The Maryland House passed a law legalizing same-sex marriage on Friday, delivering a major victory to Gov. Martin O’Malley, a Democrat, who had proposed it. Yet its implementation remained uncertain as its opponents promised to take it to voters in November.

The bill, known as the Civil Marriage Protection Act, inched by in a 72-to-67 vote, drawing loud applause from proponents in the House. A similar bill which failed in the chamber last year.

The measure is still faced with a vote in the Senate, where it is expected to pass, before Mr. O’Malley can sign it into law. However opponents have pledged to put in on the ballot for a vote on Nov. 6, a prospect that the bill’s supporters acknowledge is practically a foregone conclusion.

The vote, said the Republican minority leader, Anthony O’Donnell, amounted to “beginning a process, not ending a process. The citizens of Maryland will have the final say.”

The debate was punctuated by emotional entreaties by supporters of the bill, including several gay and lesbian delegates, who talked about their own lives, and other delegates who invoked Jim Crow laws.

Keiffer J. Mitchell Jr., a Democrat from Baltimore said, “This is the civil rights issue of our generation.” “I’m overwhelmed,” Luke Clippinger, one of the seven openly gay members of the Maryland House, said after the vote. “My voice is still breaking.”

When Clippinger was asked what the vote meant to him, he said, “It means I’m here.”

The bill’s passage would make Maryland the eighth state to allow gay and lesbian couples to marry, coming a day after New Jersey’s legislature passed a similar bill, though it was vetoed on Friday by Gov. Chris Christie. New York State legalized same-sex marriage last year, and Washington State did as well this month.

In order to be palatable to delegates who were undecided, the bill was amended so that it would not take effect until Jan. 1, 2013, in order to allow the ballot process to take its course.

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