Like Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, President Obama’s declaration that gay and lesbian Americans deserve a right to marry is a historic statement of principle, even though its practical policy implications are limited because the states, not the federal government, hold most of the power to define marriage.

Obama’s assertion that state-level prohibitions on same-sex marriage are morally objectionable but legally sound rings familiar to this Civil War historian. I can’t help but notice a close resemblance to the pre-Civil War views of millions of white Northerners (and perhaps more than a few white Southerners) on slavery. Northerners understood that the constitution protected slaveholding as a matter left to individual states, and for decades many had found this a comforting justification for their tolerance of an institution they knew should be intolerable. Slavery was a Southern problem, and as long as it could be kept a...

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As Mitt Romney slogs on toward the GOP presidential nomination, political talk is turning to his running mate. That discussion has focused on conventional political factors thought to dictate vice-presidential selection. Should Romney select someone from a large swing state or target a particular demographic? Should he focus on energizing his base or on appealing to independents? Some of those factors may come into play, yet the recent history of vice-presidential selection suggests that the key requirement for a running mate is whether he or she is presidential.

It’s curious that this threshold factor is often overlooked. Most recent presidential candidates have recognized that good politics, as well as good governance, requires choosing a running mate who would be a plausible president. Since 1976 presidential candidates from both parties have almost always chosen running mates who would be plausible as president.

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Rick Santorum has cast his presidential campaign as a religious crusade and has made no apology for it. Satan is loose in the land, according to Santorum, and he has offered himself as the only man capable of exorcising the demon.

Santorum has surged in the polls among GOP voters precisely because he is so comfortable mixing politics and religion. He presents a stark contrast to Mitt Romney, who seems profoundly reluctant to talk about his Mormonism.

Yet despite putting his religious convictions front and center in his campaign, Santorum hasn’t been entirely candid about what those convictions are. He is hiding certain aspects of them in plain sight.

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Even without its ugly imagery, Rick Santorum’s repeated claim that John F. Kennedy’s 1960 speech about religious freedom made him “throw up” would rank as one of the most unsettling remarks of the 2012 campaign. Contrary to Santorum, Kennedy did not say or imply that “people of faith have no role in the public square,” and his speech ranks as one of the classic statements of the pluralistic foundations of our country.

In September 1960, when some Protestants suggested that Kennedy’s Catholicism should disqualify him for the presidency, Kennedy confronted the role of religion in politics in a speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association. In words more poetry than prose, Kennedy argued that no one should be denied public office because of his faith, that no public official should request or accept “instructions on public policy” from any “ecclesiastical source,” and that no religious entity should seek “to...

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