I agree with Noz that the U.K. shouldn’t posthumously pardon Alan Turing for his homosexuality without also pardoning every other Brit who was treated as a criminal under that statute. But pardoning everyone is a better solution than not pardoning anyone and just leaving the stain on Britain’s history.
Noz is wise, and his overall point is dead-on. But the state can make a positive statement by declaring elements of national history as in need of some rectification. It’s wrong to do it selectively and half-heartedly, and even things like reparations shouldn’t be viewed as wiping away history.
The whole thing is weird though. Try to imagine that Albert Einstein was a natural born American, and we chemically castrated him causing him to commit suicide.
That’s basically what the U.K. is dealing with when they try to fix what they did to Alan Turing.
I get the point that it’s not enough, but a posthumous pardon is an admission that what they did was wrong. It does not erase the sin at all – it’s more like highlighting how egregious the wrong was.
The theoretical choices are:
a. Pardon everyone similarly penalized,
b. Choose a symbol of how wrong and what a price was paid by the misguided policy with Turing
c. Do nothing
I go for b) over c) and of course a) over all, if it was an actual choice.
The perfect should never be the enemy of the good or the available better.
The problem with pardoning only Turing is the message it sends – because it doesn’t necessarily read as an admission that those laws, or what they did to Turing, was wrong. It can also be read that yeah, homosexuality is terrible and a heinous crime blah blah blah, but his contributions to the Crown were so worthy that we’re willing to forgive him – after the better part of a century.
Turing was pardoned not just because he was famous and people remember him, but also because of his heroic contributions in WWII. Unless you pardon a whole lot of other people, there’s no getting around that subtext. There’s another layer, too: class. It’s a big deal in the UK, and pardoning an upper-class guy like Turing but not lower-class people whose lives were also destroyed is also a troubling subtext.
I’m glad they pardoned them – one is better than none – but no matter how many rueful words accompany it, actions speak louder. The people they haven’t pardoned still speak pretty loudly.
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The Queen has granted Alan Turing a royal pardon in his conviction of being gay. He died of cyanide poisoning two years after his sentencing. Just one year ago …
You pardon someone who did something wrong. If someone was wrongly condemned, you correct the crinimal record and declare him retrospectively innocent. According to the then laws Turing did something wrong. If all the men prosecuted for violating those laws were pardoned, the government would, in fact, be admitting it did something wrong and, as it were, needs to ask for a pardon from Turing and all the others. The prosecuted homosexuals of the past pardon the Queen! You have to love it—somehow even Oscar Wilde might.
There is a lot of context missing from this discussion.
Homosexual conduct between consenting adults in private was decriminalized in the late 1960s. (For fun, some time, find a British small-c conservative — a real one, not any of these milk-and-water latter-day Thatcherites — mention the name “Roy Jenkins” and stand well back.)
Prior to that, the law was of course enforced less often than not, but the key catchphrase is “the Law must take its course.” So must it, but what if that course never begins? That was the universal accomodation. There were occasional investigations, but one simply lied to the police and there was an end of it. (“There’s little worse in Death or Life/than David Patrick Maxwell-Fyfe.” — one of Jenkins’s predecessors as Home Secretary, and his ideological opposite.)
Turing accused himself — and the Law must take its course. (Oscar Wilde was trapped into accusing himself by Sir Edward Carson, better known for purposefully bringing Britain to the very brink of civil war in 1912-14.)
Pardons do not have the same connotations in the UK as here in the States, where criminal conviction cannot be taken to imply guilt.
Not weird. Monstrously evil. As long as he was code-breaking during England’s greatest crisis he was indispensable.
And why him and not other prominent homosexuals in academia?
According to Wikipedia, it is because he reported a burglary of his home by an acquaintance of his current lover. So the police used the occasion of his reporting a crime put another tick mark on their vice squad totals.
Searching for a cure for different has produce many strange tortures in history.
As for Einstein, if he were black, Asian, or Native American (and even a number of European ethnic groups), I can imagine it happening as long as we’re talking about the early 1950s.
I don’t think I’ve ever been called wise before. Thanks, Booman!