PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) – Aronda Kirby and Digit Murphy were once married to men, received tax breaks for married couples and were legally permitted to take family leave if their husbands or children got sick. The two women lost those protections when they came out as lesbians, divorced their husbands and set up a new household together with their six children.

“We’ve had all the rights, so we want them back,” Murphy said. “We don’t care how we get them.”

For years, gay rights advocates have fought to legalize marriage for same-sex couples. In all but one state – Massachusetts – they have failed.

Now, with couples like Murphy and Kirby in mind, some advocates who previously fought for “marriage or nothing” are shifting strategies and instead lobbying for the protections marriage provides. Those who follow the movement say bills introduced this year in Rhode Island and Washington state could signal a broader change in tactics, one that some same-sex marriage advocates worry could undercut more than a decade of work.

“It’s very new,” said Washington state Sen. Ed Murray, a gay man who represents a heavily gay area in Seattle where his constituents until recently frowned on anything but marriage. “If I had suggested this strategy a year or two years ago, I would have been run out of my district.”

In Rhode Island, advocates have introduced bills to legalize same-sex marriage every year since 1997, but they’ve gone nowhere. So this year, they hope to have some success with six new bills that focus on incremental rights rather than the label of marriage.

One would allow same-sex parents to take family leave if their partner or partner’s children fall ill. Another bill would give gay men and women the right to plan their partners’ funerals.

The legislation would also protect domestic partners from testifying against each other in court and allow a same-sex spouse to file a wrongful death lawsuit if his partner dies.

In Washington, similar rights would be granted under a domestic partnership bill. Gay leaders like Murray adopted the approach after losing a court case they hoped would lead to same-sex marriage.

Same-sex marriage advocates in both states say they’re still committed to marriage and will still support marriage bills – even if those efforts are likely to fail. They describe their plan as a two-pronged squeeze, testing whether lawmakers who summarily reject same-sex marriage will approve rights that enjoy more popular support.

“The holdup is about marriage, not about the protections,” said Jenn Steinfeld, who leads the advocacy group Marriage Equality RI. “So we’re giving them an opportunity to show us that.”

But the shift has critics both in and outside the gay rights movement.

Evan Wolfson, a gay-rights lawyer who heads the national advocacy group Freedom to Marry, cautions that anything short of marriage relegates gays and lesbians to second-class status. He said a two-pronged approach might be temporarily appropriate in some places, but he questioned whether advocates in Rhode Island and Washington pushed hard enough before switching tactics.

“What I am against is us going into the conversation bargaining against ourselves,” he said. “You don’t even get half a loaf by asking for half a loaf.”

The Rev. Bernard Healey, a lobbyist for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Providence, said the church would oppose any legislation viewed as a gradual step toward marriage – which is exactly what leaders of Marriage Equality RI say they have in mind.

The fight over same-sex marriage tends to differ by state. And the tactic could be applied in places beyond Rhode Island and Washington, said Carrie Evans, until recently the legislative director for the Human Rights Campaign in Washington, D.C.