Colombia’s Senate has once again postponed its vote on marriage equality after an impassioned all night debate.

The Senate’s vice president, Guillermo Garcia Realpe, said the voting would resume later today (24 April) as yesterday’s session did not manage to accommodate the arguments of 20 senators.

Andrés Duque, of Blabbeando blog and Noticias LGBT reported that the long debate was ‘incredibly insulting’ and that some senators alleged a ‘gay lobby’ was trying to force Colombia to accept gay marriage.

During the debate, the conservative Senator Roberto Gerlein likened gay marriage to ‘excrement’ stating: ‘I don’t partake, applaud, nor want eschatological sex.

‘I think that eschatological sex is a sex inane, unable to generate life, it is sex that is practiced for mostly recreational purposes.’

During last week’s debate, Gerlein had already warned that marriage equality would lead to the ‘destruction’ of the Colombian family.

Senator John Sudarsky of the Green Party started the debate by stating he’s voting for gay marriage because it stands for equality and justice. He said ‘the truth is that Colombia has a huge diversity’ and that the law must reflect and respect it.

The author and sponsor of the marriage equality bill, Senator Armando Benedetti, of the ruling ‘U’ Party, said that he expected a ’24-hour’ postponement would allow his ‘colleagues to respect the tenets of our constitution’.

Senator Luis Fernando Velasco of the Liberal Party joined Sudarsky and Benedetti and called for justice and equality.

However, today’s vote is unlikely to back the marriage equality bill, after an agreement was allegedly reached between Colombia’s two largest parties, the Conservative and the ‘U’, to not allow the bill to become law.

The Colombian Constitutional Court issued a ruling in 2011 that required the lawmakers to act by 20 June, 2013, or else same-sex couples would automatically have the right register their marriage in a notary services and the civil courts.

The court ruled that gay couples have equal legal rights to be constituted as a family, and that Colombian lawmakers must eliminate a ‘deficit of legal protection’.

If the Colombian senate would fail, as expected, to vote on the equal marriage bill in order to eliminate the ‘deficit’, then from 20 June notaries and civil judges will have to guarantee the right of gay couples to form a family and register same-sex marriage.