Does God hate flags?

Apparently only some flags:

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s wife, Martha-Ann, recently told a woman posing as a conservative supporter that she wanted to fly a Catholic flag at the couple’s Virginia home in response to a Pride flag in her neighborhood.

“You know what I want?” the justice’s wife said to the woman, Lauren Windsor, who secretly recorded the conversation during a black-tie event last week at the Supreme Court. “I want a Sacred Heart of Jesus flag because I have to look across the lagoon at the Pride flag for the next month.”

But Ms. Alito said that after she suggested the Sacred Heart of Jesus flag as a retort to the symbol for L.G.B.T.Q. rights, her husband said, “Oh, please, don’t put up a flag.”

She said that she had agreed, for now, but that she had told him that “when you are free of this nonsense,” “I’m putting it up and I’m going to send them a message every day, maybe every week. I’ll be changing the flags.”

Changing them to what? Maybe something that has to be translated from the original German?

“But why do you think they’re coming after you?” Ms. Windsor asked Ms. Alito in the recording. Then, using an obscenity, Ms. Windsor said that “the whole Appeal to Heaven flag” seemed like nonsense.

“Right, right,” Ms. Alito responded.

Ms. Windsor said, sympathetically, that people are “persecuting you” and “you’re like a convenient stand-in for anybody who’s religious.”

“Look at me, look at me,” Ms. Alito said. “I’m German, from Germany. My heritage is German. You come after me, I’m going to give it back to you.” She did not elaborate.

Meanwhile, right here in Pretty Blue Colorado:

The Colorado Republican Party last week sent a mass email with the subject line, “God Hates Pride.” The missive denounced Pride Month as a time when “godless groomers” attack what is “decent, holy and righteous.” It included a clip of a sermon by a famously misogynist pastor named Mark Driscoll, with thumbnail text proclaiming, in a nod to the slogan of the obscenely anti-gay Westboro Baptist Church, “God Hates Flags.” The party also posted on the social media platform X, “Burn all the #pride flags this June.”

What’s going on here is that the Steve Bannon protege who has taken over the state GOP is in a primary fight for an open congressional seat, with an opponent who agrees with him about basically everything except tone and etiquette:

One of the candidates the party endorsed was Williams himself, who is running for Congress in Colorado’s very Republican Fifth District. He’s facing Jeff Crank, regional vice president of Americans for Prosperity, in the primary, and, as The Colorado Sun has reported, using party money to support his campaign. Williams is backed by Trump and the House Freedom Caucus, while Crank, the favorite in the race, was endorsed by the House speaker, Mike Johnson. Except for a few issues like funding for Ukraine, which Williams opposes and Crank supports, the split isn’t exactly ideological. It’s more about ethics — a lot of people are furious at Williams’s appropriation of party resources — and style.

In this battle, Williams’s anti-gay provocations have become an unexpected flashpoint. Mainstream conservatives might “agree with him on gay issues,” said Dick Wadhams, the state Republican Party chair from 2007 to 2011. But “I don’t think they like the tone, the hateful tone of what he put out,” he said, and “they think his conduct has become embarrassing.”

Ruhig bitte! as Mrs. Alito might say.

Meanwhile Gay Republicans For Trump are pretty unhappy about these developments:

Valdamar Archuleta, a Republican congressional candidate in Denver and president of the state chapter of the Log Cabin Republicans, a group for gay members of the G.O.P., repudiated the state party’s endorsement over its anti-gay rhetoric. “I do think this is going to be a movement that’s going to force Colorado Republicans to kind of wake up and say, ‘All right, we can’t just sit back and give up on our state and let the fringe element of the party control the party,” Archuleta, who is voting for Trump in November, told me.

I’m voting for Trump and I’m opposed to the fringe element in the Republican party is analogous to . . . well you can work that one out for yourselves.