Via Kevin Drum, the hottest story of the day:

Here's your spine-tingling rumor of the day, straight from Robert Moynihan of Inside the Vatican. He claims that gay marriage martyr Kim Davis met with Pope Francis last Thursday at the Vatican embassy in Washington DC, just before he left for New York City: “The Pope spoke in English,” she told me. “There was no interpreter. ‘Thank you for your courage,’ Pope Francis said to me. I said, ‘Thank you, Holy Father.’ I had asked a monsignor earlier what was the proper way to greet the Pope, and whether it would be appropriate for me to embrace him, and I had been told it would be okay to hug him. So I hugged him, and he hugged me back. It was an extraordinary moment. ‘Stay strong,’ he said to me. Then he gave me a rosary as a gift, and he gave one also to my husband, Joe. I broke into tears. I was deeply moved.” ....Vatican sources have confirmed to me that this meeting did occur; the occurrence of this meeting is not in doubt.

Well, here's what we do know. Kim Davis' lawyer, Mat Staver, is a known liar and shit stirrer. So if he managed to finagle this meeting, it doesn't necessarily mean what Staver says it means, because odds are good that Staver presented this as something other than a government official who simply refuses to do her job. I'm not sure how informed the pope's people are about the players and tactics of the right wing, nor do I know how susceptible he is to stories of religious oppression that simply don't reflect reality.

But if it's true, and he did know exactly what he was doing, well, I'm very, very disappointed in this pope. It's one thing to say gay marriage is against the teachings of the Catholic church.

It's quite another to willingly provide a major PR coup and moral support to the right wing enemies of marriage.