"Winning the right to marry is one thing; being forced to marry is quite another."

Lawprof Katherine M. Franke explains:

If the rollout of marriage equality in other states, like Massachusetts, is any guide, lesbian and gay people who have obtained health and other benefits for their domestic partners will be required by both public and private employers to marry their partners in order to keep those rights. In other words, “winning” the right to marry may mean “losing” the rights we have now as domestic partners, as we’ll be folded into the all-or-nothing world of marriage....

As strangers to marriage for so long, we’ve created loving and committed forms of family, care and attachment that far exceed, and often improve on, the narrow legal definition of marriage. Many of us are not ready to abandon those nonmarital ways of loving once we can legally marry....

But we shouldn’t be forced to marry to keep the benefits we now have...

I was going to say that if heterosexual couples have been excluded from domestic partnerships — as they are here in Wisconsin — then you'd have to open up domestic partnerships to them too. But I think it would be acceptable to have a 2-tier approach to state-sanctioned relationships just for same-sex couples who are already in domestic partnerships. No new domestic partnerships would be accepted. Now, perhaps Franke thinks domestic partnerships are a great innovation that should be open to same- and opposite-sex couples. I don't see a good reason for the state to maintain 2 different types of marriage-like relationships. I didn't like the "covenant marriage" approach either.