In May 2012, Newsweek crowned Barack Obama “the first gay president” for his war on marriage. A halo appeared above his head in the cover photo. The magazine was applauding him not only for his defiance of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) but for his “evolution” in favor of gay marriage, a stance no president before him had ever taken.

This flattering narrative about his brave and anguished transformation was bogus. He had endorsed gay marriage many years before. “I favor legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight any effort to prohibit such marriage,” he wrote in reply to a 1996 issues survey from a gay magazine based on Chicago’s North Side. When this became public and threatened to cause him political damage as a state ...