In a post from Olympia earlier today, I ran some lengthy quotes from Sen. Ed Murray (D-43) and Rep. Jamie Pedersen (D-43) regarding the gay marriage and domestic partnerships bills.

Those quotes, in which both legislators explained their gay marriage strategy, were butchered (by me) as I transcribed them in a hurry. Here they are again. More intelligible hopefully.

Murray told me:

By emphasizing issues in the domestic partnership bill—being able to visit your partner in the hospital and bury your partner—we emphasize two of the 400 … 500 rights of marriage that gays and lesbians don’t have. Every year we’ll introduce more of these and people are going to get the picture that we just need to do the whole thing

The idea here is a multiple bill strategy to get people educated. If we just focused on marriage we’d just have this huge culture war.

By breaking out: “This is what we’re asking for” ….hundredes of things down the line…to be able to visit our partners… to have them on our health care… we educate people to the reality. We show people that we need to be able to protect the person we’re with or have access to their property.

Pedersen added:

What’s central to going about it this way is that we can make this progress this year. If we were going to do a symbol bill where we don’t think we’re going to pass it, why don’t we just do a marriage bill [on its own]? Or do comprehensive domestic partnership legislation. We’re doing what we can do this year, knowing that we’re going to keep on doing this and keep on adding things every session until we get marriage.

The reason for including the specific rights they did is because these rights are all things gays or lesbians could do if they paid lawyers enough. “This has an economic justice component too,” Pedersen says. “You’ve got people who can’t afford to have lawyers make all these fancy expensive arrangements,” that straight people get for the cost of a marriage license.