By Bruce Schreiner
The Associated Press

FRANKFORT- Through quiet gesture or fiery oratory, Kent Ostrander helped orchestrate rallies against same-sex marriages that turned Kentucky's Capitol into a cultural battleground.

In the waning days of the 2004 General Assembly session, Ostrander presided over hundreds of protesters who sang hymns, clutched Bibles or held placards in pushing for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriages. Adding to the tension, gay-rights activists often mingled in the same marble corridor outside the House chamber.

As sympathetic legislators climbed the steps toward the House, Ostrander motioned for his forces to cheer. Suddenly, the beaming lawmakers basked in prolonged applause and shook outstretched hands.

Ostrander - a founder of the Family Foundation, a conservative group based in Lexington - seemed ever-present as the debate roiled. In speeches inside and outside the Capitol, Ostrander grimly warned that gay marriages would shake the very foundation of society. At one rally, he urged thousands to converge on the Capitol. His group was at the forefront of the push to get the marriage amendment through a balky House and onto the November ballot.

If ratified by the voters, the proposal would amend Kentucky's Constitution to define marriage as a union only between a man and a woman. The foundation and its allies insisted on a broader version that also would deny legal recognition of civil unions.

The proposal easily passed the Senate. But it stalled in the House after days of maneuvering by majority Democrats and Republicans who seized it as a potent political issue in the November elections.

The issue could resurface when the General Assembly reconvenes on Monday for the final two days of the 2004 session.

Kentucky law already prohibits gay marriages. But amendment supporters contend the ban needs to be written into the Constitution to cement it.

Ostrander is determined to keep the issue alive.

"This is the Roe vs. Wade of marriage," Ostrander said. "If the last 30 years have been focused on the sanctity of life, these next decades will be focused on the question of adult relationships."

For more than a decade, the Family Foundation has advocated conservative causes - social and economic. The foundation resisted education and health insurance reforms in the 1990s. It pushed to create a crime of "fetal homicide."

Ostrander said the gay marriage issue touched a nerve among Kentuckians. In recent weeks, he said, his group contacted thousands of churches, representing a spectrum of denominations, in a massive campaign.

"This was just a single issue that we tossed out there to the people of Kentucky to let them wrestle with," Ostrander said. "And from my perspective, we were wonderfully surprised and affirmed in the course we are going."

Others saw the protests as an eruption of intolerance.

"What I see is the human judgmentalism that's mean and mean-spirited toward gay and lesbian people," said the Rev. Albert Pennybacker, president and chief executive of the Clergy Leadership Network, a politically active national group of liberal and moderate clergy.

Pennybacker, a retired pastor from Lexington, said the amendment would amount to a government intrusion into church matters.

"I want to say to political leaders: Stay on your side of the fence,' " he said. "I will defend the right of any religious community to decide which marriages it's going to bless.

"But I will not allow the government to make that decision or the constitution to decree that decision in advance."

Pennybacker said that "when we rob people of their marriage choice, we in essence deny their humanity."

Gay-rights activist Andrea Hildebran, executive director of the Kentucky Fairness Alliance, said the Family Foundation's rallies were inconsistent with its mission of promoting families because "what they are trying to accomplish will actually hurt a lot of families."

"It's just outrageous that they can think there's one kind of family that counts, and they're going to put this legal disability in place for people they don't approve of," she said. "The world is bigger than that."