In the U.S. right now, all day, every day, we breathe in the awareness that we're incredibly polarized.

Yet many of us live pretty siloed lives. So other than barbs traded on the internet or town halls that go crosswise and security intervenes, we don't really talk.

Along with my colleagues over on the Slate podcast podcast How To, we've been working on a series called Living at Odds. It's our effort to capture Americans who right now see things really differently and still have real relationships. And when I thought of people in my life who do this, I thought of Andrew Schneider.

Andrew Schneider leads Fairness, West Virginia, a statewide organization advocating for LGBTQ rights,

where I'm from in West Virginia. For the last decade, he's been the only full-time lobbyist

at the state capital working on LGBTQ issues.

And what's been remarkable about his tenure is that he's been quite effective at cultivating

relationships with Republicans, sometimes to co-sponsor legislation or to quietly kill bills.

But not all of them.

He says the last legislative session that just ended

was, quote, the most challenging session

for LGBTQ plus rights that I've ever seen.

But Andrew's style is not to organize protest

and social media pressure campaigns to try to be effective.

His work is slower, more relational.

He tries to bring people who don't start out as allies over to his side.

And this has been his organizing style for more than 30 years

when he decided to leave the New York City suburbs where he grew up for a

conservative college in Virginia to see if he could effectively organize for civil rights there.

In this episode, I talked to Andrew about his theory of change that involves reaching out to

lawmakers who sometimes disappoint him. I also talked to a former Republican

legislative leader who was convinced to stand up against a bill with Andrew and then got

...