'I hate to tell you, but I think I'll be voting for George Bush this Fall," she said, almost apologetically. I suppose you could call my older sister a "closet Independent," the only one in a large family that is 99 percent Republican, down the line.

"That's OK by me," I said. "But what has caused you to make up your mind so early?"

"Well, he's for marriage."

"Honey, everybody's for marriage. It goes along with being for motherhood and apple pie and church on Sunday."

"Well, you know what I mean," she said.

And I did, indeed. My sister is not unlike the majority of America. She's for marriage, but not for gay marriage. The gay lifestyle and the very idea of someone being legally and religiously bound in matrimony to someone of the same sex are especially confounding to foothills people, who view almost any change with reticence and are more Bible-belted than average.

Except for racial equality, I can't remember a more divisive or complex issue than this. Its ramifications are so far-reaching, I try to consider arguments from all sides, without taking what one good friend regards as the cowardly, selfish view: "It's none of my business. And it doesn't affect me."

"Oh, but it does affect you," he insists. "It affects how your culture will be, its values, its morality and the very survival of the institution of marriage."

"Well," I sighed, somewhat cynically, I fear, "morality has pretty well gone to hell in a handbasket already. I even heard former Sen. Alan Simpson [a Republican from Wyoming] admit that on TV recently when he said, "Britney Spears has done for marriage what the Boston Strangler did for door-to-door salesmen.'"

Another gay-marriage opponent argued that same-sex weddings are a sure and certain threat to "the institution of marriage as we know it."

"Too late, friend," I replied. "With half of today's marriages already crashing on the rocks, I doubt that recognizing gay marriages is going to make much impact on the sanctity of marriage as we once knew it."

Obviously, divorce is the greatest threat to marriage. Although no matter how much John loves Mary, today's heterosexual unions can split over such trivia as his leaving the commode lid up and her draping her stockings over the shower rod.

And no matter how much John loves Mary, theirs isn't much of a marriage when John is meeting his secretary at the Old Man River Motel when he's supposed to be working late at the office, or when Mary is learning all about multiple offense from the junior high football coach instead of marking student papers after school.

Marriage, as those of us over 40 knew it, is certainly being undermined by our gradual but almost total acceptance of heterosexuals living together without having gone through with the "I dos." What once was termed a "shack job" is now respectfully referred to as "a relationship." I laughed aloud last week when I heard a 21-year-old women complain to talk-show psychologist Dr. Joy Brown that she had caught her 43-year-old "relationship" playing around.

Asked if she were absolutely sure, she replied, "Oh, yes. Absolutely. He fessed up when I told him I had counted his Viagra pills, and he sure hadn't been spending them on me!"

"Listen, honey, drop him!" she was advised. "A 21-year-old woman has no business wasting her time on a 42-year-old man, certainly not one who needs Viagra!"

In the foothills, my relatives are quick to argue that gay marriage is, first and foremost, a biblical sin. Without being asked, they quickly cite "Romans. First Chapter." And so I look.

And there is Paul, not Jesus, saying that God gave up on the Romans because, among other things, "men giving up natural intercourse with women were consumed with passion for each other."

Reminding them of the fallacy of taking the Good Book literally is futile. For example, I cite the instruction in both Genesis and Deuteronomy that prescribes that if a married man dies without children, his brother must marry the widow and get her with child. If the brother refuses to do so or deliberately withholds his sperm, he shall pay a fine of one shoe and be otherwise punished in a manner to be determined by the law, including death.

"Now, can you imagine me taking on eight sisters-in-law as supplemental wives?" I teased my sister. "You know Thelma Louise has never particularly liked me. Besides, what's my wife-by-choice going to say about all those extra women fooling around in her kitchen?"

I am ambivalent on some aspects of the gay marriage issue, although I certainly don't think we ought to trouble the Constitution with it. But, please, as we all stake out our position and belief, can't we do it with some degree of civility and tolerance? Let's not kill each other over it. OK?