LITTLE ROCK (AP) – Advocates of a proposal that would bar gays and unmarried couples from fostering or adopting children in Arkansas said Wednesday they may try to put the ban on the 2008 ballot.

Jerry Cox, director of the Arkansas Family Council, said the group would consider an attempt to offer the prohibition as a constitutional amendment or an initiated act – if legislators don’t approve a ban by next week’s expected end of the session.

“One of the things that we wanted to do is bring this issue to the Legislature and give them the opportunity to discuss the issue,” Cox said. “It appears that they are not going to do that. In light of that, our constitution does enable the citizens to take the matters up themselves and that’s something we’re taking a look at.”

Gov. Mike Beebe said the proposal, rejected twice Tuesday by a House committee, faced constitutional problems because it did not offer equal protection to all people.

“There were a number of constitutional questions,” Beebe told reporters Wednesday.

Asked whether he hoped the proposed ban was dead, Beebe replied: “I hope any issue that would be unconstitutional or raises such constitutional concerns that throws a cloud over it would not be pursued by anybody.”

The bill by Sen. Shawn Womack, R-Mountain Home, is an effort to reinstate a ban struck down last year by the Arkansas Supreme Court, though Womack’s measure is broader than the regulation that the justices said was unconstitutional.

The proposal was rejected by the House Judiciary Committee on a voice vote Tuesday afternoon. Earlier, the bill failed when no one on the committee moved to pass it. The panel had rejected an amendment Womack offered that would have allowed gays to adopt children if they were related to the child.

Banning gays from becoming foster parents would have put into law a state regulation that was struck down by the Arkansas Supreme Court last year.

The state Child Welfare Board instituted a ban on gay foster parents in March 1999, saying children are more likely to thrive in a traditional two-parent home and should be placed in them.

Last year, Beebe said he would support banning gays from fostering children if legislation could be drawn that passed constitutional muster. Beebe has said that Womack’s bill goes beyond the foster parent ban by also including adoptions and heterosexual unmarried couples living together.

Beebe declined to elaborate on his constitutional concerns, but told reporters to read Justice Robert L. Brown’s concurring opinion in the Supreme Court ruling overturning the ban.

“You’ll start to get some pretty good inklings of some of the constitutional issues and questions that I was concerned about,” Beebe said.

In that opinion, Brown said that the ban on gay foster parents violated the equal protection and the plaintiffs’ privacy.

“There is no question but that gay and lesbian couples had had their equal-protection and privacy rights truncated without any legitimate and rational basis in the form of foster child protection for doing so,” Brown’s opinion said.

Beebe said Wednesday he considered the proposed ban separate from same-sex marriage and noted voters’ overwhelming support of a constitutional amendment in 2004 declaring marriage as between a man and a woman.

“I agree with that, and that’s a societal and legal pronouncement (of) the state of Arkansas and the people of Arkansas,” Beebe said. “Now that issue versus foster care and adoption are totally different issues with different potential constitutional issues and ramifications and with different tests.”

In order to place a proposed constitutional amendment on the ballot, supporters would have to gather signatures equal to 10 percent of the ballots cast in last year’s governor’s election, or about 78,000. An initiated act would require 8 percent of the votes cast, or around 62,000 signatures.

Rita Sklar, executive director of the Arkansas chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said she didn’t believe such a ban would find widespread support among Arkansans. The ACLU represented the four plaintiffs in the lawsuit that led to the ban’s repeal.

“I think they have nothing better to do with their time,” Sklar said. “I think a better use of their time would be recruiting adoptive and foster parents for all the children waiting homes.”