The wife of a United States Supreme Court justice is expressing a desire to display a “Sacred Heart of Jesus” flag to counter the LGBT pride flags during the month of June as her husband faces criticism over an “Appeal to Heaven” flag flying outside one of their homes.
Lauren Windsor of the media outlet The Undercurrent, which is affiliated with the far-left The Young Turks Network, released audio from a conversation she had with the wife of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito while posing as one of his supporters on X last Monday. During her exchange with Martha Ann Alito, she got the justice’s wife to talk about the controversy surrounding the presence of an Appeal to Heaven flag at the Alitos’ New Jersey vacation home.
The New York Times published an article last month detailing how the Appeal to Heaven Flag was seen flying outside the home last summer. Noting that the flag dates back to the Revolutionary War, the piece described it as “a symbol of support for former President Donald J. Trump, a religious strand of the ‘Stop the Steal’ campaign and a push to remake American government in Christian terms.”
The overtone of the article was that Alito should recuse himself from all pending cases related to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, a result of the “Stop the Steal” campaign suggesting that Trump had the 2020 presidential election stolen from him. A religion scholar the Times spoke to for the piece suggested that the flag had come to represent “a theological vision of what the United States should be and how it should be governed.”
Windsor raised the outcry over the Appeal to Heaven flag at the Alitos' vacation home, which she described as “bull----.” After Martha Alito expressed agreement with that analysis, Windsor claimed to believe that the media was “persecuting you (Alito) and you’re like a convenient stand-in for anybody who’s religious.” Alito responded by sharing her philosophy of “You come after me, I’m going to give it back to you.”
“I want a Sacred Heart of Jesus flag because I have to look across the lagoon at the pride flag for the next month,” she explained. Alito noted her husband’s opposition to her idea, acknowledging that she replied to him, “I won’t do it because I’m deferring to you. When you are free of this nonsense, I’m putting it up and I’m going to send them a message every day.”
Martha Alito added: “Maybe every week, I’ll be changing the flags. They’ll be all kinds. I made a flag in my head. This is how I satisfy myself. I made a flag. It’s white and it’s yellow and orange flames around it and in the middle is the word ‘Vergogna.’ ‘Vergogna’ in Italian means shame.”
The Sacred Heart of Jesus flag is available for sale on a website called Tradflags.com. Martha Alito’s desire to fly the flag, which depicts a heart surrounded by a crown of thorns with a cross engulfed in flames on top of it, reflects the fact that Catholics dedicate June to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The celebration of the Sacred Heart of Jesus coincides with LGBT activists’ annual recognition of the month as LGBT pride, in which where rainbow-colored flags and progress pride flags are flown to show support for LGBT ideology.
In addition to his status as one of the more conservative members of the court, Justice Alito is also one of six Catholic justices on the bench. While Martha Alito didn't explicitly elaborate on what she was talking about when she said she looked forward to her husband breaking “free of this nonsense,” it's possible she was referring to a time when her husband no longer serves on the Supreme Court.
Appointed to the bench by former President George W. Bush in 2006, Justice Alito has become a favorite target of progressive activists. The rancor toward Alito has intensified in recent years after he wrote the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organizationdecision, which determined that the U.S. Constitution does not contain a right to abortion and overturned the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide.
Martha Alito also touched upon the treatment she and her husband have received from the left-leaning press in her conversation with Windsor, recalling how a New York Times reporter insisted on “commenting on her clothes” when her husband first rose to national prominence in 2006.
She cited the criticism of her clothes as an example of how she has been “denigrated” by the media, highlighting how the reporter in question likened her outfits to a “baby blanket” and a “La-Z-Boy recliner pattern suit.”
In an op-ed for The Christian Post published earlier this month, Jerry Newcombe of the Providence Forum elaborated on the historical meaning of the Appeal to Heaven flag and condemned the “strategy to marginalize one of the most influential conservative justices.”
“The ‘An Appeal to Heaven’ flag was adopted on October 21, 1775,” he wrote. “That was the same year our war for independence began in Massachusetts on the fields of Lexington and Concord. That was also the same year that George Washington was appointed as our first commander-in-chief. Early in this role, Washington commissioned six schooners for our nascent navy.”
Newcombe detailed how, “In 1775, Col. Joseph Reed, under Washington’s command, proposed that a flag be made with a white background with a tree in the middle bearing the motto, ‘An Appeal to Heaven.’” He also traced the origin of the phrase back to English philosopher John Locke, whose ideas influenced the Founding Fathers.
