Our topic today is intolerance, but don't worry. In this forum, we tolerate no holding of hands, no sitting in circles and definitely no singing of folk songs.

Our topic today begins at whatever rehab Tim Hardaway has checked himself into and ends on a stretch of highway on the way to the South Carolina presidential primary.

Of course, we have to start with Hardaway, whose "I hate gay people" declaration makes him the leader in the intolerance clubhouse.

Once you've tossed the H-word around, you've moved past Michael Richards - and even past a weaving Mel Gibson - to an entirely new level. The good news, besides the fact that this will sell a lot of books for John Amaechi, the former NBA player who outed himself, is that Hardaway was denounced by virtually everyone - either gay, straight and/or a Ted Haggard hybrid.

In fact, Charles Barkley said Hardaway's statement was the stupidest thing he'd ever heard anyone say, which is nearly as bold a statement as Hardaway's. As I said, it has been an interesting week.

For example, during the House debate on Iraq, the benighted Virgil Goode, R-Parallel Universe, somehow merged a vote against the troop surge in Iraq with an attempt to "aid and assist the Islamic jihadists who want the crescent and star to wave over the Capitol of the United States and over the White House of this country."

That's the same Virgil Goode who also merged illegal immigration with congressman Keith Ellison's oath-taking on a Quran, saying that unless illegal immigration was stopped, there would be more Muslims elected to Congress.

(Ellison, by the way, is neither an immigrant nor illegal. He is the same Ellison, though, who expressed intolerance for Tom Tancredo's cigar smoke.)

And while we're on the topic of ugly speech, we can't let Dave "Doc" Schultheis go without mention. In a debate at the state Capitol over Plan B contraception, Schultheis said some women might claim to be raped in order to get a Plan B prescription.

"Are they going to take the word of that individual?" Schultheis asked. "You could see individuals coming in that just wanted to make sure that last night's stand didn't result in a pregnancy and basically say that there had been a sexual assault."

Let's break this down. A woman has sex, goes to a hospital, endures the rape examination, talks to the cops, all so she can get her hands on a contraceptive? Is it too un-PC to ask whether Schultheis has lost his mind?

I bring up tolerance because the entire concept is about to be tested in America in a way that it has never been so rigorously tested before.

All you have to do is look at the presidential race, in which nearly everyone wants to be some kind of ground-breaker.

You have Hillary Clinton trying to be the first woman president; Bill Richardson, first Hispanic; Mitt Romney, first Mormon; Rudy Giuliani, first ex-New York mayor who's had three wives, including one who was his second cousin and another who kicked him out of Gracie Mansion, whereupon he moved into an apartment with a gay couple, where the towels, someone once joked, were marked His, His and His.

And then, of course, there is Barack Obama, who would be the first black president, and is among the first candidates to have been described as either articulate or clean.

Certainly, he's the first major black candidate who has been accused of not being black enough. This apparently can happen where you're half-black and half-Kansan and you went to Harvard Law School and your father was from Kenya, making you a different kind of black.

When Obama said that if you're black in America, you don't have any choice as to how you're identified, Rush Limbaugh couldn't resist taking his shot: "If it's not something you want to be, if you didn't decide it, renounce it, become white."

You could have expected all of the above, but what I heard from South Carolina was shocking. South Carolina will be one of the first primary states, and nearly half the Democratic primary voters are black.

If you want a vote for tolerance, note the two polls in which Hillary Clinton - whose husband was once called the first "black" president - is leading Obama among black voters. On 60 Minutes, Obama visited this particular bit of soft bigotry, noting: There's "an assumption on the part of some commentators that somehow the black community is so unsophisticated that the minute you put an African-American face up on the screen, that they automatically say, 'That's our guy.' "

But the strangest - and saddest - word from South Carolina came from a key state senator, who's backing Hillary Clinton, when explaining why he wouldn't support Obama.

"It's a slim possibility for him to get the nomination, but then everybody else is doomed," he said. "Every Democrat running on that ticket next year would lose - because he's black and he's top of the ticket. We'd lose the House and the Senate and the governors and everything."

The man who said this was Robert Ford, who is black. He's not only black, he spent his formative years in the civil rights movement. In fact, according to his Web page, the longtime state senator was arrested 72 times during the civil rights period.

Ford supported Jesse Jackson, and he supported Shirley Chisholm. But he won't support Obama because he's afraid of what might happen if he makes it to the top of the ticket.

"I'm a gambling man. I love Obama," Ford said. "But I'm not going to kill myself."

He's afraid America isn't ready for a black president. He's afraid that tolerance - when it comes down to it - is still as far removed as a Tim Hardaway three-point jumper that clangs loudly off the rim.

littwinm@RockyMountainNews.com

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