Washington ? The House emphatically rejected a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage Thursday, the latest in a string of conservative pet causes advanced by Republican leaders in the run-up to Election Day.

The vote was 227-186, 49 votes shy of the two-thirds needed for approval of an amendment that President Bush backed but the Senate had previously scuttled.

“God created Adam and Eve, he didn’t create Adam and Steve,” said Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, R-Md., on behalf of a measure that supporters said was designed to protect an institution as old as civilization itself.

Democrats countered that Republicans were motivated by election-year politics as much as anything, particularly since a Senate vote this year ended any immediate chance the amendment could be sent to the states for ratification.

Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the Democratic whip, accused GOP leaders of “raw political cynicism” and said they hoped to “create the fodder for a demagogic political ad.”

The measure drew the support of 191 Republicans and 36 Democrats. Voting against it were 158 Democrats, 27 Republicans and one independent.

The debate on the gay marriage amendment came a day after the House voted 250-171 to overturn a 28-year municipal ban on handgun ownership in the District of Columbia. And last week, Republicans forced a vote on legislation to protect the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance from court challenge. It passed, 247-173.

While both of those measures face uncertain prospects in the Senate, they — along with the gay marriage proposal — appeal to voting groups whose support Republicans are counting on in the Nov. 2 elections. Recent surveys in battleground states in the presidential race indicate roughly one-quarter of Bush’s supporters say moral or family values are uppermost in their minds.

The gay marriage amendment said marriage in the United States “shall consist only of a man and a woman.” It also would have required that neither the U.S. Constitution nor any state constitution “shall be construed to require that marriage or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon any union other than the union of a man and a woman.”

Even among majority Republicans, the issue generated dissent.

Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, was the principal speaker on behalf of the measure, taking a role that is almost always reserved for the chairman of the committee with jurisdiction. In this case, though, the leadership bypassed the Judiciary Committee, and GOP officials said the panel’s chairman, Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., made clear he wanted no part of the debate. His spokesman did not immediately return a call for comment.

DeLay said the need for congressional action was “forced upon us by activist judges trying to legislate from the bench.”

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