Martha-Ann Alito isn’t out of control. She’s just exercising her freedom.

Follow this authorKathleen Parker's opinions

So, okay, maybe Martha-Ann is a tad impulsive. Alas, we never got together. I assume someone whispered in her ear that long, chatty walks with a Post columnist might not be such a good idea. Oh, but it would have been.

Meanwhile, this supercilious scandal isn’t about flags, but about — what else? — abortion. As one justice, who shall not be named, once put it to me: “Everything is about abortion.” This is especially true now. Justice Alito was the author of the majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case that ended the constitutional right to abortion. He has been in the crosshairs of Democratic political operatives ever since.

That’s Footnote No. 1 in this tempest-y teapot. Footnote No. 2: Democrats dislike the 6-3 conservative-majority court — and the former president who appointed the three justices whose votes tipped the scales that reversed Roe v. Wade. Footnote No. 3: Having lost their bid to stack the court, Democrats are lobbying everything they can to diminish the court and the public’s trust.

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Everything else is “heifer dust,” to borrow a term coined by the late Orlando Sentinel columnist Charley Reese. Charley was too old school to call it what it was: BS.

My guess is Justice Alito doesn’t and didn’t know what his free-spirited wife was up to. His head tends to be in a cloud where words, not flags, occupy his mind. His critics seem to think they know best how he should conduct his marriage. By closely supervising his wife? Surely not.

Long before the Proud Boys appropriated the upside-down flag to represent their backward dreamscape, it was a signal of distress, which surely describes what follows. The neighbor-nemesis, who claims she never saw the flag, has been in a sustained squabble with Martha-Ann over a sign the former erected on her lawn that read, Alito told Fox News, “F--- Trump.” Martha-Ann objected to the sign because it was near a school bus stop, he said.

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Thus began an ongoing, shall we say, “conversation” between neighbors. During one scene, Martha-Ann allegedly appeared to spit on, or toward, the offending neighbor’s car. (Was it a dry ptwoey or a nasty hocker? Details matter.) Another neighbor, according to the justice, called Martha-Ann a particularly lurid name.

Fast forward to May 2024 and, suddenly, the flag incident is all the news. Questions of ethics have been raised about Alito’s neutrality and opinion-ators began congealing around a demand that Alito recuse himself from cases concerning the events of Jan. 6. Harrumph, harrumph, harrumph.

Oh, but there’s more. Yet, another of Martha-Ann’s flags, one that featured a pine tree and the........

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