The excellent local blogger, Gay Curmudgeon, yesterday compiled a helpful, brief guide to Washington's recently extended domestic partnership law.

If you are already in a DP you can expect to get notification about the changes to the rights and responsibilities for your Domestic Partnership both 60 days and 30 days prior to the law taking effect on June 12th 2008.

Until either of those things happen, I've extracted this list from the Senate Bill Report for 2SHB 3104 for your enlightenment and edification.

There is, of course, plenty of frustration on all sides about the state's slow-go moves toward marriage equality -- even from Sen. Ed Murray and Rep. Jamie Pedersen who are guiding the laws through the legislature. Gay Curmudgeon notes "we know that we still fall very far short of all the rights we need and are entitled to.  I look forward to the progress we can make in the next legislative session."

It's also worth pulling up this comment on the new law from Beth Barrett
Bloom, President of QLaw: GLBT Bar Association of Washington:

As long as we maintain a parallel -- but not identical -- track of marriage rights for gay men and lesbians, lawyers representing our community will need a map and a flashlight to carefully tread this new frontier.

And if lawyers need a map and flashlight, the rest of us probably need... well -- a lawyer to figure it all out.

To highlight one minor irritant: Even under the new expanded law, partners here cannot yet go to the local courthouse to register, as domestic partners in Oregon (for now) or California can, but if it makes folks feel better about slow progress of things here, consider what's happening in Maryland.

Marriage-rights activists there must deal with a state court decision that was virtually identical to the decision here in which the Supreme Court punted the equality ball back to the legislature.

There was some hope in Maryland that the legislature might pass a law guaranteeing full marriage equality, even after their Supreme Court, like Washington's,  decided that marriage rights are special rights that can be denied to gay folk. But nothing much has come of the proposals.

It looks like the best gay and lesbian couples in Maryland can hope for there is a domestic partnership law even more limited than the one we started out with here last year. The Maryland Senate just passed a limited bill that would grant hospital visitation rights and some rights in estate cases to registered domestic partners. [see Qnews summary]

(And a whine: This story shows the "east coast bias" of the press that's often decried by sports fans during times like March Madness also applies to political stories like this one. I might have missed it [and it's difficult to search for since Maryland borders a city that shares its name with our state], but I've yet to see a  news story that mentions how closely Maryland's attempt to reach marriage equality mirrors Washington's. In fact, most of the stories from right-coastal sources that talk about the issue fail to recognize that the unions called "domestic partnerships" in Oregon and California are essentially identical to "civil unions" in New England and New Jersey and that Washington's is getting very close.)

Full article: The Gay Curmudgeon: Summary of changes to Domestic Partnerships in Washington State