By Greg Wright, Gannett News Service
and Patrick Crowley, Enquirer staff writer

WASHINGTON - Ohio and Kentucky senators said Tuesday they would vote for a constitutional amendment limiting marriage to a man and a woman.

However, both of Ohio's senators think Republicans are bringing it up at the wrong time.

Sen. Mike DeWine, R-Ohio, also said he is worried that some Americans consider the bill that would bar gay marriage discriminatory.

"I think voting on this now is divisive - unnecessarily divisive in the heat of a political campaign," DeWine said. "And I think for some people it sends a message of intolerance, and I think that is very unfortunate."

Republicans were pressing Tuesday for some kind of vote on the Senate floor today, even if merely to end the debate.

Both DeWine and Sen. George Voinovich, also a Republican, have said marriage should be between a man and a woman but had been undecided on whether to amend the Constitution.

Ohio enacted its own law in February that banned gay marriage. Petitions are being circulated for a vote in November on a state constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.

Kentucky lawmakers placed a state constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage on the November ballot.

States should be allowed to grant civil unions to gays, which would give them the legal rights that married, straight couples enjoy, DeWine said Tuesday.

Voinovich and DeWine said Republicans should have waited until a court threatened to legalize gay marriage nationwide before seeking the constitutional change.

"I don't think the issue is legally ripe yet," DeWine said. "But I don't set the time to vote."

Voinovich spokeswoman Marcie Ridgway said the senator believes "very strongly that marriage is a sacred union between a man and a woman."

In a speech delivered Monday on the Senate floor, Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., said the marriage amendment is "one of the most important issues this body has ever debated."

"Our nation faces a potential disaster,'' said Bunning, a father of nine from Southgate. "I hope my colleagues in the Senate realize that we have a responsibility to affirm the ideal of marriage and protect one of the basic building blocks of our society - the family.''

Bunning said judges who have permitted same-sex marriages "are attempting, because of their own arrogance, to redefine marriage.''

Senate Whip Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the second-ranking Republican in the Senate, also supports the amendment.

"Due to the actions of several activist judges, I believe that a constitutional amendment is necessary to protect the proposition that marriage is the union of a man and a woman,'' McConnell said in a statement.

E-mail gwright@gannett.com or pcrowley@enquirer.com