COLUMBIA, S.C. - A supporter of a constitutional ban on gay marriages forced the issue closer to debate Thursday in the South Carolina Senate.

The constitutional amendment has cleared the House and would go before voters in 2006 if the Senate approves it. The amendment says marriage is "exclusively defined as a union between one man and one woman" and all other unions are void.

Opponents had hoped to keep that and related bills tied up in a subcommittee for at least a few more weeks.

But Sen. John Hawkins, R-Spartanburg, surprised the Senate on Thursday with a motion that pulled issue out of the panel headed by Sen. Robert Ford, a Charleston Democrat who opposes the change.

Hawkins said Ford was scheduling hearings to hear about topics that the Senate isn't qualified to deal with, such as stability of gay relationships and the causes of sexual orientation. "We're not equipped in the South Carolina Senate to determine the causes of sexual orientation," Hawkins said.

Hawkins won a 36-4 vote that pulled the House bill out of Ford's subcommittee. It took nearly an hour for the Senate to backtrack from that after Senate President Pro Tem Glenn McConnell delivered a lecture on courtesy as he decried the "stampede" to pull the bill to the floor.

"You could have at least given him the courtesy of one hearing," McConnell told the Senate. McConnell, Ford and two others opposed Hawkins' motion.

While McConnell supports the ban, he says yanking a bill out of a subcommittee showed disrespect for a subcommittee chairman and sets a horrible precedent others would follow whenever they think legislation is moving too slowly.

"Why wait on a subcommittee? Why wait on a committee?" McConnell asked.

The Senate agreed to send the bill back to Ford's subcommittee, but said it would be heard by the Senate Judiciary Committee by March 29. Hawkins gained ground, too, because the bill will leap over others on the Senate's calendar.

A frustrated Ford initially canceled his subcommittee's Thursday afternoon meeting.

"They've already made up their minds," Ford said. "I would never violate nobody's rights like mine have been violated today."

Ford later decided to hold the meeting and the subcommittee heard from Andrew Siegel, an assistant constitutional law professor at the University of South Carolina.

Siegel said it is unlikely a court would force South Carolina to recognize same-sex unions from other states. However, if the state showed a history of singling out groups in its laws, that could backfire, he said. Courts could see that as an effort to discriminate.

South Carolina laws already are clear on the issue of what constitutes a marriage, Siegel said.

"If that's the law, what would wrong with writing into the Constitution," asked Hawkins, who is also a member of Ford's subcommittee.

The right way to address policy issues is in law, not "to bind future generations by writing it into the Constitution and clutter up the Constitution," Siegel said.

It's better to "use the Constitution for other, higher purposes and let future generations make their own decisions" about the policy issues, Siegel said.