UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter
Tom Gallagher | Oct. 7, 2015 NCR Today
Everyone loves a mystery! And do we have a mystery in figuring out who initiated and secured the meeting between Pope Francis and Kim Davis, the government official from Rowan County, Kentucky, whose attempts to impose her anti-marriage equality religious views on her community by not issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples in defiance of the law landed her — rightfully — in jail. Her illegal behavior under the guise of “religious liberty” made Davis the reigning queen of far right conservative groups.
As I noted yesterday, the law firm representing Davis, Liberty Counsel, was designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-gay hate group for spreading false information. The Southern Poverty Law Center lists 728 hate groups, e.g., Neo-Nazi groups (142 groups) and active Ku Klux Clan groups (72 groups), in the United States and has created a U.S. map identifying each group and its location, which you can view here. You can read the center’s analysis of Liberty Counsel and its lawyer, Mat Staver, here.
Married lawyers Mat and Anita Staver run Liberty Counsel. In reviewing the organization’s 990 tax returns, it was a bit odd to read the disclosure about their relationship in the filing as “Anita Staver and Mat Staver have a family relationship.” For such a zealous pro-traditional marriage firm, it seems odd that they didn’t list themselves as “husband and wife.”
So for now, all we really know is that the Vatican’s representative to the U.S., papal nuncio Carlo Maria Viganò, is in the center of who might have approved Davis’ highly secret rendezvous with Pope Francis at the nuncio’s residence in Washington, D.C., that included a Secret Service pick-up and delivery of Davis and her husband, Joe.
But did Viganò act alone?
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