...And there is simply no way to understand segregation in this country without understanding the housing policies of Democratic president Franklin D. Roosevelt and the G.I. Bill signed by Democratic president Harry Truman. Barack Obama is a Christian and the president of the United States and thus the inheritor of the full legacy of that grand office. He is neither, as Ross tries to position him, an outsider to American sin nor Christian sin. It’s his heritage too, and Obama is wise enough to know that he can’t simply charge off the bad parts of that heritage to intransigent Southern bigots.It has been enlightening to watch this entire spectacle play out over the past week. There are now intelligent people going on television to tell us that the president should not use the word "crusade" to describe ... The Crusades. The problem is history. Or rather the problem is that there is no version of history that can award the West a stable moral high-ground. Some of the most prominent Christian leaders in this country used their authority to burnish the credentials of South Africa's racist regime—not in the 1960s, in the 1980s. At this very moment, there are reports that Uganda's attempt to make sex between men a capital offense is tied to the very sponsors of the Prayer Breakfast where Obama spoke. In such a world, a certainty about which "side" is always good and which "side" is forever evil doesn't really exist. And in an uncertain world, Obama is making a wise appeal for vigilance—vigilance against the death cult of ISIS, and vigilance against the allure of death cults period—even those inaugurated in the name of one's preferred God.