A bill to amend the Constitution to outlaw marriage between gays will reach the House this week, adding to the heated debate that began raging in the Senate yesterday and threatening to extend discussion of the contentious issue through the summer.

With the likely failure of Senator Allard’s Marriage Protection Amendment to reach the two-thirds majority it needs in the Senate, Rep. Marilyn Musgrave,a Republican of Colorado, will put forward a bill this week codifying marriage between a man and a woman, according to the Family Research Council, a marriage protection group.

Unlike her previous attempts to define marriage in the Constitution, however, Ms. Musgrave’s legislation, using exactly the same language as Mr. Allard’s proposal, leaves room for state legislatures to develop alternatives to marriage for same-sex couples.

Though still to be announced, the appearance of Ms. Musgrave’s Marriage Protection Act later this week will come as little surprise to legislators.

“They say this is not political, but you can see how political this topic is,” Rep. Barney Frank, a Democrat of Massachusetts, said. “After the Senate defeats [the Allard bill], they plan on voting on it in the House. Frankly, I expected her to do it sooner.”

The Senate began debating the same-sex marriage ban yesterday, with Senator Brownback of Kansas and Mr. Allard speaking extensively. Both have a long history with same-sex marriage legislation, Mr. Allard having originally introduced a more stringent Federal Marriage Amendment in the fall of 2003 cosponsored by Mr. Brownback.

“Were trying to protect the state Legislature from having its laws and the people’s wishes overturned by unelected judges in the branch of Federal Court,” Mr. Allard said.

“There are numerous efforts to redefine marriage to be something that it isn’t. Two men and two women simply don’t meet the criteria for marriage as it has been defined for thousands of years. I don’t believe framers ever thought this would be an issue, and if they had they would have put it in the Constitution.”

Tomorrow the Senate is expected to vote on cloture, which allows the debates to end a vote on the resolution to occur, according to a spokesman for Senator Frist. In 2004, the Federal Marriage Amendment ended at cloture after only 58 Senators voted to bring the measure to the floor, two shy of the 60 needed.

Should Mr. Allard’s resolution make it through this stage, which is possible, it would still need a two-thirds majority to pass – a highly unlikely outcome, many say, since senators are expected to vote as before and five Republicans have stated their strong opposition to the amendment.

Speaking in Manhattan, Senator Clinton called the renewal of the samesex marriage deliberation a “priority of the political machine of the White House and the Republican majority.” She told about 1,500 at the New York Women for Hillary lunch that the people’s main concerns were terrorism, gas prices, the cost of health care, and affordable housing and she called for Congress to refocus.

“What we are doing this week is not on that list,”she said.” After 9/11, I think the president could have asked us to do anything and we would have done it. There wereso many opportunities and,unfortunately, a different kind of decision was made. We’re seeing it this week.”

In Washington, President Bush announced his support for the amendment to an audience of religious leaders, emphasizing his desire to take same-sex marriage “out of the hands of activist judges and put it back into the hands of the people.”

“Some argue that marriage should be left to the states,” Mr. Bush said. “But when judges insist on arbitrarily deciding on it, the only solution is a Constitutional amendment – a law that cannot be overturned.”

A letter sent to members of the Senate yesterday by 2,500 religious leaders expressed the desire for the “respect of the right of each religious group to decide, based on its own religious teachings, whether or not to sanction marriage of same-sex couples.”

However, Nathan Diament, the director of public policy for the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America – representing nearly 1000 American synagogues – spoke with Mr. Bush yesterday about supporting the amendment.

“Let me note that one of the leading architects of the gay rights legal strategy recently said that the battle between religious liberty and gay marriage is a ‘zero sum game,'” he said after the president’s meeting yesterday.

“Just look at the campaign being waged nationwide against the Boy Scouts; after the U.S. Supreme Court recognized the constitutional right of the Boy Scouts to determine for themselves who may serve as their scoutmasters, a campaign is being waged to deny the Scouts access to public parks, public charity campaigns, and more.

“Should same sex marriage be legalized, we know what will follow is this sort of campaign waged against any church, synagogue, or other community institution with traditional beliefs about marriage,” Mr. Diament said.

Recent polls show that while the majority of Americans agree with the definition of marriage as that between a man and a woman, attitudes toward same-sex marriage have shifted since the late 1980s.

In 1988, 12% of Americans said gay couples should have the right to marry while 73% were against, according to the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.

However, a Gallup poll published on May 11 this year shows 42% of Americans believe gay unions should be recognized as marriage, while 56% believe they shouldn’t.

The Constitutional amendment is favored by 50%, while 47% oppose it, according to the American Enterprise Institute.