Alan Turing, the Enigma codebreaker who took his own life after being convicted of gross indecency under anti-homosexuality legislation, is to be given a posthumous pardon.
The government signalled on Friday that it is prepared to support a backbench bill that would pardon Turing, who died from cyanide poisoning at the age of 41 in 1954 after he was subjected to "chemical castration".
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon, a government whip, told peers that the government would table the third reading of the Alan Turing (statutory pardon) bill at the end of October if no amendments are made. "If nobody tables an amendment to this bill, its supporters can be assured that it will have speedy passage to the House of Commons," Ahmad said.
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.
Ahmad 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.
Allan Turing was also instrumental in developing the notion of a 'Universal Machine,' the harbinger of the modern day computer. Which means that every homophobic redneck that calls somebody a "faggot" on Twitter is doing so on a device that owes its very existence to a homosexual.
How's that for irony?
While there are some applauding this action by the British government there are others who find even this to be an insult to the memory of this great man.
It is an insult to the memory of Alan Turing to talk about "pardoning" him, when he never did anything wrong in the first place.
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) July 21, 2013
If there is any "pardoning" to be sought, it should be of the English judicial system, which hounded Alan Turing to his death.The man has a point.
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) July 21, 2013
I just recently finished reading The Codebreakers which deals, in part, with the cracking of the German Enigma Cipher machine. Alan Turing was a genius whose work is widely credited with shortening World War II by a couple of years and who is probably responsible for saving tens or hundreds of thousands of lives, perhaps millions. The thought of pardoning him is indeed a travesty. Parliament should pass a resolution apologizing for the treatment that this man received along with so many others whose only "sin" was being true to themselves.
ReplyDeleteHah! Without the successful work of the codebreakers, WWII would have been over a year or two earlier. Sprechen sie Deutsch?
DeletePlease, don't drink and post.
DeleteIf you ever have a chance, see the 1986 play about Turing "Breaking the Code," or the BBC film of the same name with Derek Jacobi.
ReplyDeleteToo bad that movie is not on DVD, maybe now they will release it as such.
DeleteWe need that Gross Indecency law in the US right now.
ReplyDeleteOnly if it is used against those who think we should have one!
DeleteAnonymous3:42 PM
Delete"Gross Indecency law"....sounds like something Baldy Louise Heath Palin has been breaking since 2008!
Lock that crazy bitch up now! LOL!!!
Just think of what this man could have done for the whole world except for man's stupidity. It is even more stupid because British scientists knew better. After the bombing of London in WWII, medical/scientific folk started noting that the women who had spent the nights in the subways etc. were have homosexual boys at an unusual rate. They started the studies and even the earliest hypotheses included something went wrong prenatally. I agree with Dawkins; the pardon is an insult especially since they refused to pardon all the other victims of this law.
ReplyDeleteElizabeth 44
The punishment in 1952 was harsh. Alan Turing accepted treatment with female hormones (chemical castration) as an alternative to prison. He died in 1954.
ReplyDeleteThe Sexual Offences Act of 1967 decriminalized some homosexual.
The entire planet owes Alan Turing an incalculable debt for the truly profound work he did during WW II.
ReplyDeleteIt is really beyond the scope of a comment here in IM to go into the far reaching, and absolutely ground breaking genius it took to imagine and BUILD the tools needed to break the encryption of the German Kriegsmarine (submarine) messaging system.
The device that the Germans used in the sub service is commonly known as the "Enigma" machine
Here's a very brief clip from the xcellent movie, explaining an overview of what it looks like,
and how it encrypted text messages.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=godWZyeSEPk
Turing and others designed the logic and algorithms for gigantic 8 foot high analog machines known as bombes, which were programmed to assist in decoding the encrypted messages created by the Enigma machines.
The bombe in this video is a distant ancestor of all the computers we use today.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6JActWg7Zc
The Germans were winning WW II in a big way during 1942 by sinking hundreds of allied ships supporting the British and Russian war effort using U boats.
As Gryphen relates, literally MILLIONS of lives around the world depended on the phenomenal work of the codebreakers and Bletchley Park during the war, and Turing was the person who was most instrumental in this life and death struggle.
Turing literally was another Einstein and it is a travesty he is so little known or remembered for his efforts during the war.
It's hard to believe that a man who was so gifted was hounded to death for his sexualit