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 southern problem, Northerners’ thinking went, they would bear little moral responsibility. It was this North that elected Abraham Lincoln in 1860.

For all of Lincoln’s success as lawyer, politician, orator, and commander-in-chief, perhaps what should be most celebrated about our sixteenth president is his capacity to evolve, a point raised eloquently in Eric Foner’s 2011 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Fiery Trial. A product of the times in which he lived, Lincoln moved gradually from tepid moral aversion to slavery to blunt public declarations of his “belief that slavery is wrong,” as in his famous 1860 Cooper Union Address.

After he was elected president, Lincoln’s antislavery evolution slowed in the face of sharp political pressures—most notably his desire to prevent secession and, failing that, to retain the support of Union slave states such as Kentucky and Maryland. Famously he asserted that “if I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.” Perhaps even more tellingly, early in the war Lincoln revoked two different generals’ orders freeing slaves in their military departments.

Yet Lincoln continued to progress, however gradually, in an antislavery direction. The fact of secession changed everything. As the Confederacy waged a bloody war to protect slavery, Lincoln was compelled to consider the real meaning of his previous warnings that the nation could not long persist “half-slave and half-free.” Moreover, it was becoming very hard to ignore the thousands of southern slaves who attempted to free themselves by absconding to Union lines.

And so, on Jan. 1, 1863, President Lincoln finally issued an Emancipation Proclamation. In this oft-misunderstood landmark declaration, Lincoln embraced black freedom as a military necessity, offering emancipation primarily to Confederate slaves over whom the Union had no practical authority. At this time he still encouraged African-American emigration to Liberia. Nevertheless, the Proclamation transformed the president’s position. His public support for emancipation won him plaudits from antislavery radicals, even as it temporarily cost him electoral support.

Over the ensuing years Lincoln’s principles advanced toward the edge of political possibility, and in the process he gained the support of a polity that was evolving alongside its president. He soon endorsed black military service, a 13th constitutional amendment forever abolishing American slavery, and finally just days before he was gunned down, extension of voting rights to some African-Americans (specifically soldiers and “the very intelligent”).

We can only speculate on how Lincoln’s views on interracial democracy might have evolved further if he had survived the assassin’s bullet. But by the time he breathed his last, Lincoln’s transformation was undeniable. As he conceded to Frederick Douglass in 1863, he had at times been “tardy.” But Lincoln also insisted that he had never retreated from the increasingly antislavery positions he staked out. In that fact the radical Douglass found cause for praise and optimism.

Like Abraham Lincoln, Barack Obama has been “tardy.” Pushed by developments beyond his control (including occasionally by his off-message vice president), Obama’s public positions on marriage equality have continued to progress, though gradually. Already we had glimpsed the evolution of his principles in his advocacy of gay and lesbian military service. In recent days, Obama has been rightly celebrated for his momentous declaration, and also justifiably assailed by those who had hoped for more. After all, he might have promised to fight for equality, instead of merely asserting a belief in it while also accepting a federalism that allows states to discriminate against gay and lesbian Americans. Still, there may be reason for optimism.

While the stakes for President Lincoln were undoubtedly higher, we should not doubt that the fight for marriage equality is a vital struggle for all Americans’ civil rights, one that many future historians will likely celebrate. Hopefully, they will have reason to view President Obama’s May 2012 proclamation as a turning point—assuming that, like Lincoln, Obama continues to evolve.

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Corey M. Brooks is assistant professor of history at York College of Pennsylvania.

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.

The evidence is in the names of those selected. Bob Dole, Walter F. Mondale, George H.W. Bush, Lloyd Bentsen, Al Gore, Jack Kemp, Dick Cheney, Joe Lieberman, and Joe Biden were among the outstanding political figures of their generations. Before being chosen, they had demonstrated a high degree of political skill and public policy sophistication at the national level. The 13 running mates since 1976 brought an average of 14.5 years experience in high governmental positions, generally with distinction.

Of course, it wasn’t always that way. Conventions, not presidential candidates, used to choose running mates for a variety of political reasons: to balance the ticket, to placate a losing faction, or to appeal to a large swing state.

But that calculus changed as the vice presidency rose in significance, first during the 1950s and more dramatically beginning with the Mondale vice presidency. The rising power of the presidency made the vice president more visible and more important, first as a presidential successor, then as a colleague to conduct the government’s business. Furthermore, in the information age what a vice presidential candidate says anywhere can immediately be transmitted everywhere. Presidential candidates came to understand that a running mate who was not ready to perform under the pressure of a presidential campaign could complicate their chances.

It’s not that citizens base their votes primarily on the running mates. Few do. But they form impressions of presidential candidates in part based on their vice-presidential selection, their first major personnel decision. Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush all publicly acknowledged this reality and chose able, well-credentialed running mates.

An inexperienced running mate can divert attention from the ticket’s preferred messages. The news media home in on any vice presidential candidate who seems unprepared. During the 1988 vice presidential debate, the underestimated Dan Quayle faced repeated questions regarding his qualifications before he compared his experience to that of John Kennedy in 1960. Quayle’s analogy teed up Bentsen’s famous reply, “You’re no Jack Kennedy.” And Katie Couric’s questions to Gov. Sarah Palin in 2008 about newspapers she read and Supreme Court decisions she opposed were designed to test her knowledge.

Presidential candidates still consider political attributes of prospective running mates, but those characteristics matter only after the pool is narrowed to the truly presidential.

Sen. John McCain ignored this lesson of recent history in part because he thought he needed to gamble to have a chance to win. He focused on Palin’s political strengths–her ideology, her appeal to the Republican base, her gender, her maverick image–without imagining her in the Oval Office. Palin did help mobilize the Republican base, but ultimately the choice undermined McCain’s claim to “Put America First” and alienated uncommitted voters he needed. By late in the campaign, various public opinion polls showed that relatively few considered Palin qualified to be president. Her selection diminished voters’ confidence in McCain’s judgment and made some voters less likely to support him.

The Palin selection demonstrates the danger of choosing an untested running mate without carefully assessing whether he or she is presidential. That’s not to say that a good process will inevitably produce a good running mate. Witness the 2004 choice of Sen. John Edwards. But subordinating presidential quality to other political considerations is an invitation to trouble.

Presidential candidates are more likely to serve their country, and themselves, if they make presidential qualifications the threshold test in choosing a running mate, as most recent presidential nominees from both parties have done. The pundits and the people should demand no less.

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Joel K. Goldstein is the Vincent C. Immel Professor of Law at Saint Louis University School of Law. He has published extensively on the vice presidency.

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.

Santorum is a Catholic. While he has always acknowledged this, he has downplayed the specifics of his Catholic faith in order to curry favor with fundamentalist Protestants, many of whom regard Catholicism with roughly the same disdain they have for Mormonism.

For example, GodVoter.org, a self-appointed fundamentalist watchdog group, praises Santorum for his homophobia and his opposition to all forms of contraception, but then reminds fundamentalists that Catholicism is not true Christianity. Catholicism’s “wayward historical fruits,” according to the group, include “indulgences (allowing people to pay money to indulge in their sins), inquisition (torture and murder of non-Catholics), pedophilia, idolatry of Mary, dead ‘saints’ and Popes.” These all “fundamentally contradict the Bible.”

That kind of anti-Catholicism has been a staple of American fundamentalism and religious politics for a very long time, and represents the kind of bigotry American Catholics have tried to overcome. What may be less familiar is that Santorum’s brand of Catholicism — what we might call Fundamentalist Catholicism which insists on the “teaching authority” of bishops and popes — has just as much contempt for Protestants.

Recently, Santorum accused President Obama of worshiping a “false theology.” Some commentators read this comment as an appeal to the birther conspiracy crowd who insist that the president is secretly a Kenyan-born Muslim. Others saw this as a reference to the president’s environmental policies.

But while Santorum may have been speaking about the president’s “world view,” as he later put it, there is another context in which we might view that remark. The charge of “false theology” rings quite closely with the Papal Encyclical “Mortalium Animos” issued by Pius XI in 1928. Denouncing an ecumenical movement that tried to bring Protestants and Catholics together, Pius wrote “nor is it anyway lawful for Catholics either to support or to work for such enterprises; for if they do so they will be giving countenance to a false Christianity, quite alien to the one Church of Christ.”

For the Vatican, in other words, the “false theology” is Protestantism.

Likewise, Santorum reports that he wanted to “throw up” over President Kennedy’s 1960 speech in which he said “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute.” That’s an odd reaction from a Catholic, given that the separation of church and state in this largely Protestant nation has allowed Catholicism to flourish, and many chalked it up to overheated, hyper-ventilating campaign rhetoric.

But fundamentalist Catholics like Santorum have never accepted any separation of church and state and have always insisted on the primacy of their church in civil affairs. Pope Leo XIII, writing in 1890, declared, “No one can without risk to faith, foster any doubt as to the Church alone having been invested with such power of governing souls as to exclude altogether the civil authority.”

That same pope, in 1885, also rejected the very foundation of American religious freedom: that we are each free to worship in our own way. In his encyclical “Immortale Dei” Leo XIII dismissed the idea “that no preference should be shown for any particular form of worship; that it is right for individuals to form their own personal judgments about religion; that each man’s conscience is his sole and all-sufficing guide; and that it is lawful for every man to publish his own views, whatever they may be, and even to conspire against the State.”

I don’t know whether candidate Santorum subscribes to these pieces of fundamentalist Catholic doctrine as part of his unwavering Catholic faith. But that’s just the point: While Santorum has denounced birth control and gay marriage as part of his religious crusade, he has been coy about whether his Catholicism extends to the rejection of Protestantism or the right to conscience.

In this sense, Santorum’s crusade is not just against the 1960s and the Woodstock generation; it is against the 1560s and the Protestant Reformation generation. One wonders how his Protestant supporters will react once they figure this out.

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Steven Conn is Professor of History and Director of Public History at the Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio.

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 impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials.”

Kennedy affirmed his commitment to an America that is “officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish” and “where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.” He envisioned “an America where religious intolerance will someday end; where all men and all churches are treated as equal; where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice.”

Yes, Kennedy proclaimed a belief “in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute,” but he never said that “people of faith have no role in the public square.” Indeed, he promised to act based upon what “my conscience tells me to be the national interest” and to protect “the First Amendment’s guarantees of religious liberty.”

Contrary to Santorum’s mischaracterization, Kennedy never sought to banish religion from public life. In his inaugural address, delivered four months later, he swore his presidential oath “before ‘Almighty God’” and proclaimed that “the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God.” Kennedy implored all “‘to heed in all corners of the earth the command of Isaiah — to ‘undo the heavy burdens . . . (and) let the oppressed go free,’” and he closed by “asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own.”

Less than three weeks later, Kennedy argued that America was founded on two interdependent propositions: “a strong religious conviction, and … a recognition that this conviction could flourish only under a system of freedom.”

In a broadcast address on civil rights in June 1963, Kennedy said the nation was “confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution.” The previous day, in a commencement speech at American University on arms control, Kennedy invoked “the Scriptures” for the teaching that “when a man’s ways please the Lord . . . he maketh even his enemies to be at peace with him.”

Kennedy understood that religious conviction had a place in civic discourse and in shaping attitudes on public policy. But he rightly believed that such discussion must occur in a pluralistic context that accepted the legitimacy and equality of various religions, that rejected religious tests as a qualification for public office, and that encouraged public officials and citizens to discharge their political responsibilities based on the public interest.

Kennedy’s Houston speech helped shape a consensus understanding of religious pluralism that has lasted for half a century. Ronald Reagan, for example, echoed some of its themes near the end of his 1984 re-election campaign. Reagan said that America was “founded as a nation of openness to people of all beliefs. And so we must remain. Our very unity has been strengthened by our pluralism.” America had no established religion, it mandated “no belief, nor will we ever. Church and state are, and must remain, separate. All are free to believe or not believe, all are free to practice a faith or not, and those who believe are free, and should be free, to speak of and act on their belief.”

Religious pluralism is a cornerstone of our nation, an ideal that infuses our founding documents and our history, an intrinsic part of what makes us indivisible. That is what Kennedy was talking about a half century ago in Houston. That should not upset our stomachs, or our minds.

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Joel K. Goldstein teaches and writes about constitutional law and the presidency and is a writer for the History News Service.