From yesterday's Columbian
Defending Domestic Partnership: Vancouver Women have Suffered Laws' Effects on Their Health, Pocketbooks
by Kathie Durbin, The Columbian, Tuesday, 20 October 2009, p. C1.
Claire Fulenwider and Harriet Forman found their Vancouver dream house tucked into a forested bower in West Minnehaha one year ago.
They moved to Vancouver from Santa Fe, N.M., so Fulenwider, 67, could accept a position as executive director of the Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance, a Portland nonprofit.
Forman, 66, is a retired elementary and middle school teacher and principal who taught in Wisconsin and New Mexico.
The two were married in New Mexico, where in 2004 a county clerk briefly issued marriage licenses to same-sex couples until the practice was shut down by the state's attorney general.
But that marriage is not recognized in Washington under the state's Defense of Marriage Act.
Each woman has an irrevocable living trust naming the other as her beneficiary. Those trusts are not legally valid in Washington either, Fulenwider said.
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