Stephen Hawking pushes for posthumous pardon for Alan Turing
theregister.co.uk
theregister.co.uk
No one seems to mention "who he did" either from what I can gather - a teenager (19) he picked up at the cinema in the incident he was arrested for. He was 40.
It's kinda weird to me as many in the UK wouldn't be particularly accepting of that sort of age gap now, particularly not for casual sexual liaisons. The age of consent for homosexual male sex was lowered to 18 in 1994 - that means that up until 1994 Turing's actions were illegal in the UK.
If you add in that he was privy to official secrets and would be a potential target to foreign powers then his apparent promiscuity would also be an issue of national security - I think a person in his position now would be vilified by the press and that it would be right for them to be disciplined (at least) for conduct unbecoming of an intelligence service office holder.
>remembered only as a gay man //
Whilst he's being made a poster boy for casual homosexual sex it seems people too forget he was engaged to a work colleague. Perhaps he was bisexual, it's got to be a strong possibility.
Are there any quotations from him about homosexual sex, or his lifestyle choice? Did he revel in his liaison(s) or regret them? I've not seen anything from these points apart from material that appears to have a bias towards promoting him as a model of gay pride.
If he was given a pardon this would set a very difficult precedent. Consider if cannabis is made legal in a couple of years how many pardons, and subsequent lawsuits, would that single legal change produce. Then think of all the other laws - even minor things like regrading of a speed limit on a road, the law has changed making a former activity that was prosecuted no longer illegal.
That all said I agree in general this story appears not to really be an argument about Turing. Or if it is then it's attempting to leverage a strange moral attitude that those of note should not be subject to the rule of law.
This is puritanical BS. He was a single man dating adults. That's his own business, the press plays it up because society as a whole loves gawking at this sort of behavior, but it's no risk to anyone.
Personally I'd expect a current serving officer with high level security clearance who is privy to some of our most sensitive national secrets to be disciplined for seeking sex with random youths (of any persuasion).
If you're in this sort of position you need to get security clearance for sexual partners surely? Do you really want your "spies" getting intimate with any random person that flirts with them at the cinema?
The Profumo Affair doesn't seem a million miles away as an analogue. I'm not cognisant with many such cases however. There was the Max Mosley scandal - an MI5 agent "resigned" because his wife had sex with someone else.
Unless U.K. law is entirely different than the United States, the specifics of a pardon do not set any sort of legal precedent.
1. I don't see how continued discrimination against gay people into recent decades (and, indeed, the present) supports your claim about public attitudes towards 'age gap'. Unless you're suggesting that there's some kind of morally significant link between the two. In that case, maybe you can explain why the age of consent for girls (16 between 1885 and 1994) needed to be raised from 13 in the first place.
2. In a debate over equal rights, assertions about the moral sentiment of some presumed majority are completely irrelevant. Appealing to legality and the democratic process and in the same breath to some vague idea of mob 'acceptance' is hypocritical. You can't have it both ways.
3. Even if discriminatory age-of-consent statutes were relevant, it's not 1994. The age of consent in the UK has been 16 since 2001 -- that's one third longer than the preceding period that you suggest reflects current public sentiment.
> lifestyle choice
Oh.
Unless you go and systematically posthumously pardon people how are you serving justice by only pardoning historical persons famous enough to have enough of a modern following to petition the modern-era government on their behalf?
So as far as precedent goes this doesn't appear relevant [to me] as in Turing's case it is a revisionist attitude to the moral underpinning of the law at the time that has changed things and not the material facts.
Maybe that discomfort will remind us to be better people.
What we should be pushing for is a redaction, and an acknowledgement that the prosecutors were ignorant morons who harassed and extinguished a great mind because they didn't know any better.
In this case, I guess pardon is not appropriate. I think the way we think of pardons at least in the US, is your first sentence, in which case Turing should definitely be pardoned.
Although rare these days there were times when a pardon could be won or purchased in exchange for services rendered. It didn't mean that you were innocent of your crime.
The prosecutors, judge J. Fraser Harrison for example, appear to have been far from moronic.
An unambiguous cause for Turing's suicide doesn't appear to be known.
Your allegations of ignorance though seem valid.
If giving him the pardon gets rid of software bugs, it's a small price to pay for a great gain.
(For the record: "gay" means joyful, basically.)
But nobody is this by Nature. We all are sometimes happy, sometimes tired. This is the normal way of life.
We all are persons (by definition), and sexual behaviour can change in someone's life (we have hundreds of thousands of examples of that).
So, what does "gay" even mean? An excuse to allow a lobby to abuse the rest of us?
In current usage, "gay" refers to homosexuals, a group of humans which other groups of humans enjoy hating and fearing. A group which is still fighting for the basic humans rights the rest of us enjoy, such as the right to marry their lifetime partners.