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Alan Turing Likely To Be Given Posthumous Pardon
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."
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.
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.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Not to similar. The Boy Scouts are not sentencing people "to chemical castration."
Turing was sentenced to 1 year in prison. He was give the option to avoid prison by undergoing hormone therapy.
Geeks are the ones explaining in detail what GCHQ has been recording on Brits. Geeks are the ones who thought Turing was given a bad deal. So this is a fob to pretend that Cameron is somehow the friend of geeks, even as he's destroying the privacy right and making 'democracy' a joke word.
Seriously, fuck off Cameron, you were elected to fix the surveillance state, no token honor to Turing will fix what you've done Cameron, *no*, what you're *doing* Cameron. It's on-going. We get it, we voted for your to end the surveillance state and you let the policy decided by New Labour lead you. You are not a leader sir, you are an embarrassment.
Fuck off and resign. Turing would be ashamed to see how computers have been turned against the voters. Do you think he made a machine that could be used to persecute him? No.
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.
I'm sure that will make him feel better.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
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.
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.
Moms know.
Sometimes they do, sometimes they blissfully put up blinders and pretend that nothing's happening. When I told my mom I was a lesbian, her first words were "no you aren't", and it was 5 years and many girlfriends later that she finally acknowledged that I might be queer. To this day, she still hopes I'm going to find some guy and start popping out grandkids.
...which left him impotent and with breasts.
So they turned him into Steve Ballmer?
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
A pardon is the government forgiving someone for doing something wrong. What the British government should do in this case is admit that the government was wrong to ever enact the statute in question, and exonerate everyone ever punished under it.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
It's too easy to end up with laws just as stupid and evil as those against "impaired driving". The wrongdoing isn't impaired driving, it's incompetent driving, incompetent for WHATEVER REASON, but even then only as a condition in an event which involves injury to other people and destruction of their property. Otherwise no wrong has been done to anyone.
I see your point, however, you should consider that this is the sort of law that by its very nature must not be written exactly at the "fence line" where impairment actually kills people. In other words, the line has to be drawn some distance over on the safe side of things. This is an inconvenience to people who can hold their liquor and drive safely, but raising the legal BAC limit would open the floodgates of homicidal drunk driving. If a mental/physical coordination test were exclusively administered instead of a blood alcohol content test, that would be fine, but the legal limit would again have to be set somewhere well over on the safe side of things, which would still make some people mad. So I think your objection is unreasonable in the last analysis.
Society was not happier.
Just quieter. People were afraid to say they're unhappy.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
hopes I'm going to find some guy and start popping out grandkids
And why not? It's not like you have to marry him. Or even have sex with him. Two words: Turkey baster.*
* Note that the child will technically be a baster'd
The reason given why he wasn't pardoned was so that we can accept our shameful history. Retroactively pardoning someone doesn't actually do anything... no one thinks just being gay should be illegal now in the UK (well, as close as possible to no one).
The pardon doesn't actually do anything about current issues with homosexuality, transgender issues, etc. It's just a self-congratulatory pat on the back, "weren't we awful back then", pointless exercise.
We'll be going around pardoning all the Catholics next, then the Protestants.
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
My Scoutmaster was gay - this was back in the late 60's. Never caused any harm or touched any of us, Of course even though we had a pretty good idea, it wasn't until later years he confirmed.
Horrors! If he was only like the other troop in our town, with a God fearing Righteous American who disciplined his Scouts with a Bullwhip (this is real, we'd seen the lash marks.
As to why it's so important? Ist shouldn't be. I might ask you the question of why you assume that a gay man is going to have sex with a child? If you are straight,, are you going to try to have sex with every feamale child you see? Do you assume Gay equals pedophile?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.