The state of Washington recently passed a law that replaced every mention of "marriage", "husband", or "wife" in state law with "marriage or domestic partnershi

The state of Washington recently passed a law that replaced every mention of "marriage", "husband", or "wife" in state law with "marriage or domestic partnership" and "spouse or partner". This had the net result of conferring all of the same (state-level) benefits on same-sex couples and on elderly people who didn't want to remarry but were in new relationships, while completely avoiding the social/religious question of whether person X thinks relationship Y is acceptable or should be called "marriage". From a database perspective, there's no reason the Washington state database needs to track gender. It needs to track who's involved in the legal relationship and what legal rights they have regarding each other's person and property. (If we wish to make things more complicated by allowing arbitrary graphs for relationships, we need to write the laws governing those rights more carefully.)