Comments

1
I'm not married, nor am I gay ... But even I am aware this was going to happen. They made it pretty clear when we voted on and passed the initiative that this would occur.
2
My understanding is that there are issues with pensions for seniors, meaning that they needed a separate system from marriage. It sounds like gay seniors will still have the same rights, so this is just clarifying the situation. If you're under 62, your choices are "single" or "married", whether you're gay or straight.
3
BREAKING: Democracy functions as expected and agreed upon.
4
The alternative, auto-dissolving domestic partnerships, would leave some couples without legal protections if they happened to be living under a rock and didn't know that domestic partnerships were going away. It seems to me that auto-converting to marriage errs on the side of preserving legal protections for couples, which was the primary argument for domestic partnerships in the first place.
5
So sad too bad got taken to the courthouse and now I'm glad
6
LOL @ "DP to Marriage"
7
Would Washington issue a marriage license for a couple with an individual still registered as domestic partner to another?
8
@3, democracy shall be null and void where it surprises the internet though.
9
This was pretty well talked about at the time. I'm surprised that people are being surprised by it now. I've also heard (from a few pals who've gone and officially married this last year) that the date of marriage is being back-dated by the state to the date of their domestic partnership, which is kind of cool. I mean, it still doesn't reflect the full length of their commitment, but cool that it will show as having been made several years ago.
10
I wouldn't be surprised if this provision was challenged in court. DP is not marriage so the level of contractual consent is different. And as for everyone knowing about it - what about a couple that moved away to another state that didn't recognize DP, broke up without bothering to inform Washington state, and married other people? That would lead to a legal mess and the courts would likely rule that WA state exceeded its authority in auto conversion of DP to married.
11
I can't imagine a lot of downside to the conversion. I'm usually pretty imaginative about worst-case scenarios, too. (I'm defective that way. Well, among others.)

But, let's say there's a case where actual marriage would disadvantage someone, perhaps in terms of federal income taxes or something, isn't all they have to do is dissolve their domestic partnership before the conversion date?

You know what gets my goat, though? Here in New York, after same-sex marriage was legalized, couples who were married years ago in our Quaker meeting, and who had their lovely, engrossed Quaker marriage certificates, signed by at least 50 witnesses who stood and held them in the Light as they married before God, still had to start over. The damned NYS marriage certificates wouldn't be back-dated to the date of their religious-community-validated-and-certified religious marriages.

You guys are doing it right.
12
@10 I stand corrected. I'm not as good as I thought about imagining worst-case scenarios.

My self-esteem needs a drink now...
13
I'm curious how the law effects my out of state partnership now that we're Washington State residents?

We registered in Portland where we were living at the time and later moved to Washington partly because of Oregon's homophobic law, and partly because we found a nice house.

Washington clearly honored our DP and we didn't and don't worry about that. Now that Washington State is converting the partnerships I've been trying to find if our partnership also auto-converts or if Washington will continue honoring it. Will we be one of the very few couples now placed in the "limbo" this was meant to avoid?

If anyone has any links to the actual portion of the law I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks in advance.
14
@13 You are now married to your cat.

Here is the Washington State page about the conversion. There's some contact info at the bottom if you have questions.

http://www.sos.wa.gov/corps/domesticpart…

If that isn't enough I would try somebody like Lambda Legal to see if they can straighten things out.

http://www.lambdalegal.org/help
15
I read the ballot and voted to recognize gay marriage and guarantee by law that every married gay couple gets the same benefits and protections of any other married couple. I did NOT vote for simply converting domestic partnerships into marriages. There's nothing whatsoever to prevent gay partners from choosing to formalize their relationships with public marriage vows or a quick stop at City Hall to fill out the forms for a license. But Jeez Louise, if the State is going to turn every domestic partnership into automatic marriage, it might as well turn every current separation of married partners into automatic divorce.
16
Does anyone know if this applies to domestic partners registered with certain counties but NOT registered with Washington state? I assume the answer is no, but I can't find a solid answer.
17
@15 unfortunately, that's not how the initiative was broken down. Next time I'd recommend reading the bill itself, or the arguments in the voter information pamphlet, or the many breakdowns of what the bill did that were available online leading up to the election. Democracy depends upon an informed electorate.
18
@15: I am pretty sure you did... I mean in as much as that was what the law said that you voted for. Note also that the state WON'T be converting all DPs into marriage, just the ones which aren't being dissolved and where neither partner is over 62 as of June 30th, 2014.

This is equality: If you are both under 62, you can get married, or not. If one of you is over 62, you can get a DP, or you can get married, or be legally separate. It doesn't matter the genders of the people involved in any way.
19
@13

Thank you from me and the cat.
20
Damn cat distracted me... @ 14 :-)
21
This shouldn't be a surprise to very many people.

I was in a DP. As soon as marriage equality passed, we received a letter from the state explaining our options and the auto-convert default date. We got married last summer. Had we chosen not to be married, we would have had a year and a half to dissolve the DP so it wouldn't auto-convert.

Sure, there may be a handful of cases such as Dr. Z @10 describes, and the courts will have to work that out. But for the vast majority of the rest of DPs, this will be no surprise and there has been plenty of time to avoid the auto-conversion if we wanted to.
22
If you guys have been doing DP for months or years, you might as well get married.
23
If you are surprised by this you are dumb as hell. It was a repugnant bill made by assimilationists and they will assimilate you now. Fuck off.
24
When the DP law was enacted back in 2008, the law said that if you wanted to break up, you couldn't just pack up your stuff and leave --- you had to go through the same kind of divorce proceeding that opposite-married people had to go through. We all knew about that, right?
25
It's called "Common Law Marriage". It happens to straight couples too. Usually after living together for 7 years.
26
@21: you cannot legally dissolve a DP in a state where it is not recognized.

DPs are an affront to true civil rights for LGBT. They were never something our community freely chose or truly accepted. They were merely expedient: they were the best we could win from a deeply prejudiced electorate. They were Jim Crow marriages. The question is what to do about them now. To convert them to marriages is to confer legitimacy that was never deserved. To ignore them is to add insult and injury to the gay couples - myself included - who settled for the best deal we could obtain, shameful as it was.

This is what you get for setting up second class citizenship in the first place: a legal mess.
27
Straights do domestic artnershis also. Does this mean that they are now "married"? If not, why not? Gays can't choose between domestic artnershi and marriage, but straights can? So @18, the genders do matter: different genders aren't going to be automatically married.
28
@27: we used to have two kinds of DP. Avoiding the puerile joke I really want to make, it was seniors and gays. There shouldn't be any straight DPs where both people are under 62. The state website states all domestic partnerships where both are under 62 will be converted to marriages.

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