NBC NEWS: When former Vice President Joe Biden announced the historic selection of Sen. Kamala Harris of California as his running mate, he added a candidate to the ticket with a pro-LGBTQ political record that goes back to 2004.

"It's clear the Biden-Harris ticket marks our nation's most pro-equality ticket in history," Alphonso David, president of the Human Rights Campaign, the country's largest LGBTQ rights group, said in a statement.

Harris first ran for elected office as San Francisco district attorney in 2004 when LGBTQ rights were firmly established in local law, but still highly contentious nationally.

After winning that election, she established a hate crimes unit to investigate and prosecute anti-LGBTQ violence. In 2006, Harris organized a conference in California that brought together over 100 officials from across the U.S. to discuss strategies to end the use of the so-called gay and transgender panic defense. In 2014, California became the first state to ban the practice in law. (To read more, Click Here.)