It's not about the Old People

Okay - here's a pet peeve of mine. Domestic Partnerships are not about the old people. It sometimes makes me feel a little dirty how our movement is using them.
You see for the domestic partnership laws, several states have wooed the senior vote by including them in the domestic partnership law. The idea is essentially it allows legal recognition of an important relationship without interfering with federal benefits and pensions available to widows (and the occasionally widower). But gay people (as a general overarching amorphous group) don't want domestic partnerships. We want marriage. We want an end to discriminatory laws around marriage. We aren't really seeking a better understanding of protecting ways that we organize our families that don't fit within an outdated male/female and then children nuclear family model.
We will also readily throw our 62+ people under the bus and not even acknowledge that's what we're doing. So when we have this everything but marriage d.p. law and the fight to keep the law in place (i.e. to approve the Referendum) and we talk about the benefit it provides seniors, we are neglecting to realize that if we end up converting domestic partnerships into marriage, they will lose all the benefits they were trying to have protected.
Maybe some people are fine with this, but I'm not. We need to have a non-marriage option that allows people certain legal connections without all the economic and other complications. Something that merely says, you're the person who gets to be there and make decisions when I'm sick you can make decisions for me and visit me regardless of our bloodline (without having to understand all the various types of powers of attorney and spending all the money on lawyers to get it).
Okay that's all for now. And probably for tonight as I'm blowing this popsicile stand - if I do turn the computer back on it will be for other work, not for blogging.