'Bones' Pushes Prime Time Propaganda on 'Don’t Ask-Don’t Tell'

Maybe it’s just happy coincidence. Maybe Hollywood really is taking White House suggestions for its scripts. Or maybe liberal group think has evolved to the point where they don’t just think the same things, they think them at the same time.

Whatever the case, just a day after President Obama’s “surprise announcement” in his State of the Union speech that he intends to overturn the military’s “Don’t Ask-Don’t Tell” policy, the issue surfaced again in prime time. And the inclusion of propaganda in a TV drama was even more incongruous and gratuitous than Obama’s sop to his left wing.

The Jan. 28 episode of Fox’s forensics-based crime drama, “Bones,” centered on the murder of a gay man, and the writers took the opportunity to inject some standard talking points about the inequity of gays being unable to marry and the threat of physical violence from straight men.

But in their zeal to cover the gay rights bases, they shoe-horned in an out-of-place shot at “Don’t Ask-Don’t Tell.” A discussion of a suspect’s possible motives included this extraordinarily weird exchange:

BRENNAN (Emily Deschanel): Native Americans believed homosexuals were of two spirits, held them in high esteem. So what’s the problem?

BOOTH (David Boreanaz): There’s no problem. Why are you looking at me like that? I was a soldier. I mean gay guys, they saved my life in battle more than once. 

Right. He probably once shared a foxhole with a transgendered sergeant, too. And the Native Americans probably had some profound wisdom about cross-dressing machine gunners.

If Hollywood writers feel compelled to lard their offerings with liberal propaganda, they should at least try to do it a little more artfully. Dropping labored references like that into the dialogue is as jarring as, well, making a statement about “Don’t Ask-Don’t Tell” in the middle of a speech on the economy.