Alan Turing Likely To Be Given Posthumous Pardon 210
pegdhcp writes with news that the UK government has signaled its intent to support a bill that would issue a posthumous pardon to Alan Turing, who is known for his work in defeating the German Enigma code machines in World War II and widely considered the father of computer science. Turing was charged with and convicted of "gross indecency" in 1952 for being gay. He was sentenced to chemical castration, and he committed suicide two years later.
"The announcement marks a change of heart by the government, which declined last year to grant pardons to the 49,000 gay men, now dead, who were convicted under the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act. They include Oscar Wilde. ... [Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon] told peers: "Alan Turing himself believed that homosexual activity would be made legal by a royal commission. In fact, appropriately, it was parliament which decriminalized the activity for which he was convicted. The government are very aware of the calls to pardon Turing, given his outstanding achievements, and have great sympathy with this objective That is why the government believe it is right that parliament should be free to respond to this bill in whatever way its conscience dictates and in whatever way it so wills."
Screw them (Score:5, Insightful)
He gets pardoned for his "outstanding achievements". Yet again, it isn't the Rule of Law or ethics that rules Britain, but fame. If you are famous, you get off. And if you are not famous and the law is horribly immoral, then you are fucked.
Re:Screw them (Score:5, Insightful)
Honestly, the entire concept of being Pardoned in this case would be yet another insult.
What they should issue is an Apology.
Re:Screw them (Score:4, Insightful)
No it doesn't.
There WAS a bill last year to pardon 49,000 people, including Turing. It failed.
There is nothing in the summary or TFA that indicates whether the new bill is for that same group of 49,000, or for Turning alone. You MAY be right, but neither the summary or TFA supports that conclusion.
Re:Screw them (Score:5, Insightful)
Honestly, the entire concept of being Pardoned in this case would be yet another insult.
What they should issue is an Apology.
Mod parent up. Pardon implies that the action was wrong, but excusable. An apology would imply that Turing (+others) did nothing wrong and that it was in fact the law that was wrong.
floodgates? (Score:4, Insightful)
The government argues that they can't pardon everyone because it would open the floodgates for anyone convicted of any crime subsequently legalized to ask for the same. To my mind that's a lame excuse for not pardoning every gay man convicted of this one specific crime.
Re:floodgates? (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no reason to pardon him. Apologize for making a bad law sure, but pardon no. It was illegal at the time, and there were no exigent circumstances requiring him to break the law for the public good. There is really no reason to offer a pardon.
Re:Similar Gay Boy Scout Ban (Score:4, Insightful)
Not to similar. The Boy Scouts are not sentencing people "to chemical castration."
Re: Screw them (Score:5, Insightful)
They might want to pardon those still living with criminal records for this.
There are rather a few.
Several enigma machines (Score:5, Insightful)
Many people think Turing cracked Enigma, but this is only partially true.
The Poles were the first to crack Enigma. Turing's lot later cracked naval Enigma. It took the capture of a downed U-boat to crack an updated naval Enigma.
Re:floodgates? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why permit such revisionist history at all? If you're going to pretend he was not a criminal, then you must also pretend the government didn't convict him. Are we going to pretend the US never had slavery if Congress passes a law to posthumously free all slaves back to 1776? It's absurd. That Alan Turing was convicted of the crime of homosexuality is a historic fact and his "crimes" only reflect badly on the UK government, not on the man himself.
Re:Sexual liberation is a dead-end (Score:5, Insightful)
Society was happier when people were focused on family and behaved in a (relatively) chaste manner.
Part of maintaining that structure requires a clear sexual values system, including a sense of what is normal.
When we go pluralistic, or make "anything goes" the new normal, this traditional order is threatened.
While I will never support the persecution of someone for being quietly gay, I think a lot of the excesses of that time were designed to counter-act the rising sexual liberation movement.
You suffer from the terrible misapprehension that there is such thing as "normal" when it comes to human sexuality, and that people have ever done anything more than pretend to conform to your mythical "chaste" behaviors. All of recorded history shows us that A) human sexuality is a spectrum that has always included things like homosexuality and B) humans are really not very good at being "chaste".
Also, last time I checked there were an awful lot of people inhabiting those "happier" time periods you refer to who were not happy at all. Quite the opposite in fact, since they were busy being persecuted for what they felt was perfectly normal.
It certainly sounds very much like you do support the persecution of anyone who doesn't fit your personal definition of "normal" or threatens your idea of harmonious social order.
More on topic: This whole thing with pardoning just Alan Turing because he happened to be a genius and helped to win a war makes me want to puke. If the law and the resulting persecution was wrong they should be apologizing and pardoning every single person who was ever prosecuted under that law. Not just Turing. What, those 49,000 others aren't good enough for a pardon? They weren't genius enough to earn an apology for being persecuted? Give me a break. If it was wrong, it was wrong. Otherwise it's just favoritism.
Re:Screw them (Score:5, Insightful)
No. Pardon implies the action was illegal, but excusable. And the action was illegal. Whether you like the law or not, he was actually "guilty" of it, even if the law was poorly and unevenly applied.
What really needs to be understood is that being convicted doesn't make you evil. The law exists to preserve the existing order. And many times, the existing order is deficient, but must serve to maintain society until it can be changed.
Re:Several enigma machines (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Similar Gay Boy Scout Ban (Score:1, Insightful)
It's nothing like that.
1. The BSA is a private organization, not the government.
1A. The BSA can't incarcerate anyone for violating the ban.
1B. The BSA ban isn't a law, it's a rule.
2. Why is it so important for gay men to get out into the woods with little boys?
LK
Re:Screw them (Score:0, Insightful)
Oh shut up you worthless fuck. If you're not intellectually grown up enough to realize that law isn't what defines morals, you have nothing to say that is interesting to this discussion.
Re:Similar Gay Boy Scout Ban (Score:3, Insightful)
1. The BSA is a private organization, not the government.
A 'private' organization that nevertheless enjoys an extremely close relationship with said government, starting with the congressional charter and extending throughout all the special treatment given to them and their members by local schools, fire and police departments, and particularly the military. People defending them are always quick to claim the BSA receives 'no federal funds' but that's not really accurate since the taxpayer pays for the schools and the schools in turn financially sponsor the local BSA chapter in many cases. So the BSA is a private organization only when it suits them, and it suits them when their true homophobic colors are under attack, oh yes.
Re:Screw them (Score:5, Insightful)
That's shameful. His name and reputation deserve a pardon, but so do all the others.
In a sense, since the person is not alive anymore, a post-humous pardon is mostly about showing contrition - the state's for its actions toward others - and moving forward in a better manner. By not pardoning everyone else, and singling out Turing, the state - and the society as a whole to some extent - engages in a a grubby, partisan deed and shows no contrition for the victimising activities.
I'd expect nothing less from the bunch of self-interested, unprincipled politicians who we have in parliament these days, though.
Re:Similar Gay Boy Scout Ban (Score:2, Insightful)
Why is it so important for men to get out into the woods with little boys?
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Similar Gay Boy Scout Ban (Score:4, Insightful)
2. Why is it so important for gay men to get out into the woods with little boys?>
Why is it so important for men to get out into the woods with little boys?
Ah; it's the old "All gays are child molesters" trope yet again.
Actually, you should ask "Why is it so important for self-described "straight" men to get out into the woods with little boys." ;-)
After all, the Boy Scouts haven't banned all gay men, only the ones who are open and honest ("out of the closet") about their predilections. They accept closeted gays as Scout leaders.
(We might also repeat the oft-noted observation that "homosexual" and "child molester" aren't synonyms. They probably aren't even correlated. There are child-molesting straight people, and gays who don't find pre-puberty children sexually attractive. If your motive is to protect the children from molestation, excluding gays has little if anything to do with such goals.)
But the main point here is that the Boy Scouts have in fact only excluded people who admit to being gay, while not paying nearly as much attention to people who claim to be straight.