The Good Wife and how Liberal Cultural Propaganda works

One of the func­tions of the lib­eral con­trol in Hol­ly­wood the to pass on the lib­eral mind­set hid­den within drama. It’s done with some sub­tlety, to make sure it is not too obvi­ous, but like Joe Mor­gan and the pitchout one you know the signs you spot it every time.

Last Sunday’s episode of the The Good Wife is no excep­tion. The pri­mary sto­ry­line of this weeks was a case of a spousal shield in a fed­eral court. You have two execs who are accused of defraud­ing the IRS, After an objec­tion a gov wire­tap of the CEO’s con­ver­sa­tion with his wife is dis­al­lowed under spousal priv­i­lege, a sec­ond wire­tap of the CFO’s con­ver­sa­tion with his gay spouse causes a dis­pute because of DOMA.

And of course this is the week when the pro­tag­o­nist, lawyer Ali­cia Florick Gay brother hap­pens to show up say­ing how proud he is that she is fight­ing this.

A well-​known Supreme Court Lawyer Jeremy Bres­low (Played by Bruce McGill) want­ing to over­turn The Defense of Mar­riage Act vol­un­teers to join the defense as it is con­sid­ered an excel­lent chance for over­turn the law. This leads to an inter­est­ing exchange where Judge Clau­dia Friend (Cheers’ Bebe Neuwirth) and both sides argue the “valid­ity” of both the law and of the gay couple’s marriage.

There is a sequence where Bres­low brings in a for­mer Attny Gen­eral to tes­tify about the cur­rent administration’s opin­ion of DOMA. The Fmr Att Gen­eral states the Admin­is­tra­tion con­sid­ers the law uncon­sti­tu­tional and there­fore it should not be enforced.

The Fed­eral pros­e­cu­tor (played by Brian Den­nehy) then comes back with a litany of ben­e­fits that the fed­eral gov­ern­ment doesn’t allow show­ing the gov­ern­ment enforces the law when it comes to money.

The judge see­ing this asks for evi­dence as to the “mar­riage” of the gay couple.

This is a clever moment, by list­ing the ben­e­fits “not allowed” it paints a pic­ture of an evil gov­ern­ment deny­ing equal pro­tec­tion to peo­ple because of sex­ual ori­en­ta­tion rather than a group of peo­ple redefin­ing an insti­tu­tion for their own nar­cis­sism. It allows the show to attack the law in the guise of defend­ing it.

In the end after dur­ing tes­ti­mony over fidelity and “Free Fri­days” the judge (Bebe Neuwirth) rules that DOMA is the law of the land and the wire­taps can be played. Of course con­sid­er­ing her argu­ment the entire sequence ask­ing for evi­dence is mean­ing­less, but the point was to argue the unfair­ness of DOMA to the view­ing audi­ence not to make a real­is­tic court drama.

So the point is made Vio­lins play and the audi­ence is shown just how HOR­RI­BLE DOMA is. The lib­eral writ­ers had done their work.

And that is what we are fight­ing against 100 times a week on Net­work TV.

How would this work if things were dif­fer­ent? How would this pay out if it had been writ­ten by a con­ser­v­a­tive? Well that’s my next post…

Update: How a con­ser­v­a­tive would have writ­ten it

Update 2: Removed the words “on a reg­u­lar basis” from the 3^rd to last sentence.