Last month we learned that Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito’s wife flew two flags synonymous with the “Stop the Steal” movement outside the couple’s Virginia residence and New Jersey beach house in 2021 and 2023, respectively. Around the same time, The New York Times also reported that Martha-Ann Alito had allegedly spit at an anti-Trump neighbor’s car on Inauguration Day 2021. If, after hearing all of these stories, you chose to reserve judgment about the kind of person Mrs. Alito is, congratulations on having an open mind. On the other hand, if you started to paint a picture in your head, and assumed that the deeply conservative justice’s wife was probably also something of a bigot holding the belief that she should be able to express herself via flags but that others—say, LGBTQ+ people and their allies—should not be afforded the same right, congratulations: You nailed her.

In an audio recording published on Monday, Martha-Ann is heard telling Lauren Windsor—a documentary filmmaker and “advocacy journalist”—that she wants to fly a Catholic flag in response to a Pride flag in her neighborhood that apparently offends her. “You know what I want?” Alito tells Windsor, who secretly recorded the conversation last week during an event at the Supreme Court, posing as a Catholic conservative. “I want a Sacred Heart of Jesus flag because I have to look across the lagoon at the Pride flag for the next month.” Alito then says that she received pushback from her husband, whose response to her proposal was, “Oh, please, don’t put up a flag.” While she says she temporarily agreed, she adds that she told the justice that “when you are free of this nonsense, I’m putting it up and I’m gonna send them a message every day. Maybe every week I’ll be changing the flags.”

Even more disturbingly, Alito then tells Windsor: “I made a flag in my head. This is how I satisfy myself. I made a flag. It’s white and it has yellow and orange flames around it. And in the middle is the word vergogna. Vergogna in Italian means ‘shame.’ Vergogna. V-E-R-G-O-G-N-A. Vergogna. Shame, shame, shame on you.”

Flames and the Italian word for “shame” make it sound a lot like Martha-Ann is suggesting LGBTQ+ people should burn in hell, but perhaps there’s another explanation entirely that she will clarify soon. (A spokeswoman for the Supreme Court did not respond to a request for comment from the Times concerning the recording.) Elsewhere in the conversation, after Windsor claims that the justice’s wife is “a convenient stand-in for anybody who’s religious,” Martha-Ann responds by…appearing to use her German heritage as a threat. “Look at me, look at me,” she says. “I’m German, from Germany. My heritage is German. You come after me, I’m gonna give it back to you.”

Meanwhile, Martha-Ann was not the only member of the Alito family Windsor spoke to last week. She also chatted with Justice Alito, who told her that the left and right are impossibly divided and that one side is going to “win.” He also agreed with Windsor’s contention that “people in this country who believe in God,” as Alito clearly does, “have got to keep fighting for that—to return our country to a place of godliness.”

Does that amount to a stunning admission of bias on Alito’s part? It would if we didn’t already know exactly where he stands.