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So, the Boston Herald’s little run-in with Justice Antonin Scalia’s “obscene,” (well, maybe not so much) gesture seems to have reached an extreme in high comedy. The Herald has responded to Scalia’s letter to the editor with this editorial, (do read the entire thing) which concludes:

So in a letter [Scalia] explained the origins of the gesture and insisted it wasn’t obscene.

Maybe so, but it’s still not something you’d do to your mother.

The Herald further bolsters its, um, “case,” in another article in today’s paper, with explanations of the gesture’s meaning from some “Sopranos” stars, who, as the Herald’s headline explains, are “Divided On Bawdy Body Language.” The “it’s not something you’d do to your mother” defense might have been generated from one of the Herald’s interviews with a “Sopranos” actor John Fiore, who offered his opinion on the gesture: “'It’s not that bad, but I wouldn’t do it to my mother. No way. Would I do it in church? These days, maybe. It depends if the priest was giving me the hairy eyeball,' said Stoneham native John Fiore, who played Sopranos capo Gigi Cestone."

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Perhaps the generally limited access that the media has to Supreme Court justices has something to do with the media frenzy that typically accompanies anything remotely newsworthy that transpires among the nine jurists. So, when Justice Antonin Scalia responded to a Boston Herald reporter’s inquiry as to whether “he fends off a lot of flak for publicly celebrating his conservative Roman Catholic beliefs,” by making what the reporter described in a Monday article as “an obscene gesture, flicking his hand under his chin,” the news tended to spread -- far and fast. And it seems that a justice making obscene hand gestures would be a fairly substantial development.

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