Last month, Yes for Marriage President Susan Roylance challenged opponents of the amendment defining marriage to a debate.

Don't Amend Alliance Director Scott McCoy agreed to the concept. But Roylance has yet to appear at one of nearly a dozen debates scheduled on television and radio leading up to the Nov. 2 election. Instead, amendment proponents have sent Brigham Young University law professors Monte Stewart and Richard Wilkins and amendment legislative sponsor Rep. LaVar Christensen, R-Draper.

McCoy and Yes for Marriage organizer Sheldon Kinsel were trying to work out the details of a debate this week. But McCoy insisted Amendment 3 political issues committees add Roylance and Constitutional Defense of Marriage Director Gayle Ruzicka to the list of attorneys debating the issue. Kinsel refused.

"It is not appropriate for your group to try to specify who any of the participants on our side will be, just as we would not presume to specify who you would choose," Kinsel wrote in a letter this week.

So McCoy rejected the planned debate. He says supporters of the controversial amendment written to define traditional marriage and deny legal status to any other domestic unions are trying to put a moderate public face on conservative political issues committees.

"Why are they afraid to send the president of one organization and the director of another?" McCoy asks. "They're trotting out surrogates who are not known to be as extreme. They won't put those two women in front of the public because they know what effect that will have."

Ruzicka did not return phone calls seeking comment.

But Sen. Chris Buttars, a West Jordan Republican who co-sponsored the legislation and organized the Defense of Marriage committee with Christensen and Ruzicka, rejects the idea that amendment supporters are trying to keep her under wraps. And he denies that Ruzicka is a polarizing figure.

"That's baloney," he says. "Maybe we will have her debate. But I'm not going to have them tell me who to pick."