I now have to admit that the other side of the divide in the gay rights movement, the go-slow side, was correct. And so, it turns out, was Sims. He refused to break the law, despite pressure from me and many other impatient gay residents to do so, a stance that seemed to genuinely pain him.

"There is a law in the state of Washington," he told gay rights supporters in March 2004. "It doesn't mean I like it. It means I have no choice. It doesn't mean that I find it just. It means I have no choice but to uphold it."

Sims didn't just sit on his hands, however, and contemplate his respect for the law; he decided to work as an activist within the legal system. He told gay rights supporters that he remembered images from his youth of Gov. George Wallace standing in the doorway of an Alabama school to block integration, and said he didn't want to be remembered as the man who stood in the doorway to block gay rights. On March 8 of last year, he invited six gay couples selected by a local gay rights group to come to the county's marriage office, at which point he denied them licenses and then promptly invited them to sue King County. The case, Anderson vs. Sims, is now before the Washington Supreme Court.

Sims was preparing to run for governor at the time (if he'd been successful he would have become the state's first black governor), and he knew his move would anger conservative Washingtonians outside of liberal King County. He addressed these voters with a simple quote from King: "The time is always right to do what's right." A few months later, Sims lost in the Democratic primary to state attorney general Christine Gregoire, whose public position had been that Washington was not ready for same-sex marriage. She went on to win the election.

In the end, Sims is perhaps a minor figure in the national battle over gay rights. But his insistence on working within the law created an important study in opposites between Washington and Oregon, one to which gay Americans should pay attention.

Last spring, gay residents of Oregon enjoyed the euphoric feeling of participating in or witnessing officially sanctioned same-sex marriages. But it was a fleeting moment. Now the state has no legal same-sex marriages and a newly approved constitutional ban expressly prohibiting them. Washington, in contrast, is in the midst of a carefully orchestrated legal process, started by Sims, that could very well result in the state's becoming the next Massachusetts. The deliberate slowness with which justice moves has been frustrating for some gay rights supporters in Washington, but the pace of the process has allowed them to get organized in a way they haven't been in years, as exemplified by their rapid and loud response to Microsoft's recent decision not to support an anti-discrimination bill in the state Legislature this session.

It has also given activists time to try to win over conservative residents of rural areas in advance of a Supreme Court decision that, if it follows the growing body of national case law supporting same-sex unions, will be quite upsetting to them. A backlash is still sure to emerge in Washington if same-sex marriage is legalized, but because of the time the legal process has allowed for dialogue between gay rights supporters and opponents, it will probably be less severe than in Oregon and other states.

All of which puts me in a rather humbled position. A year after Sims chose to work within the law rather than break it, life in Washington suddenly seems more full of possibility for gays and lesbians than it does to the south of us, in Oregon. My state has emerged as one of the rare outposts of optimism in gay America, and for that I have to thank, in large part, the fact that Ron Sims didn't listen to me.

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