Posted by Eugene Volokh:
U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown Apologizes for Conviction of Alan Turing:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_09_06-2009_09_12.shtml#1252697088
The [1]statement:
2009 has been a year of deep reflection - a chance for Britain, as
a nation, to commemorate the profound debts we owe to those who
came before. A unique combination of anniversaries and events have
stirred in us that sense of pride and gratitude which characterise
the British experience. Earlier this year I stood with Presidents
Sarkozy and Obama to honour the service and the sacrifice of the
heroes who stormed the beaches of Normandy 65 years ago. And just
last week, we marked the 70 years which have passed since the
British government declared its willingness to take up arms against
Fascism and declared the outbreak of World War Two. So I am both
pleased and proud that, thanks to a coalition of computer
scientists, historians and LGBT activists, we have this year a
chance to mark and celebrate another contribution to Britain�s
fight against the darkness of dictatorship; that of code-breaker
Alan Turing.
Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his
work on breaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to
say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of
World War Two could well have been very different. He truly was one
of those individuals we can point to whose unique contribution
helped to turn the tide of war. The debt of gratitude he is owed
makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated so
inhumanely. In 1952, he was convicted of �gross indecency� -- in
effect, tried for being gay. His sentence -- and he was faced with
the miserable choice of this or prison -- was chemical castration
by a series of injections of female hormones. He took his own life
just two years later.
Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan
Turing and recognition of the appalling way he was treated. While
Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can�t put
the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am
pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are
for what happened to him. Alan and the many thousands of other gay
men who were convicted as he was convicted under homophobic laws
were treated terribly. Over the years millions more lived in fear
of conviction.
I am proud that those days are gone and that in the last 12 years
this government has done so much to make life fairer and more equal
for our LGBT community. This recognition of Alan�s status as one of
Britain�s most famous victims of homophobia is another step towards
equality and long overdue.
But even more than that, Alan deserves recognition for his
contribution to humankind. For those of us born after 1945, into a
Europe which is united, democratic and at peace, it is hard to
imagine that our continent was once the theatre of mankind�s
darkest hour. It is difficult to believe that in living memory,
people could become so consumed by hate -- by anti-Semitism, by
homophobia, by xenophobia and other murderous prejudices -- that
the gas chambers and crematoria became a piece of the European
landscape as surely as the galleries and universities and concert
halls which had marked out the European civilisation for hundreds
of years. It is thanks to men and women who were totally committed
to fighting fascism, people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of
the Holocaust and of total war are part of Europe�s history and not
Europe�s present.
So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live
freely thanks to Alan�s work I am very proud to say: we�re sorry,
you deserved so much better.
[2]George Pullum (Language Log) elaborates:
Turing did indeed deserve so much better. He created modern
theoretical computer science; opened fundamental new areas of
mathematical logic; made very important contributions to other
areas of mathematics (e.g., the technique known as Good-Turing
frequency estimation in statistics); and most importantly, he gave
up his academic work during the Second World War to work at
Bletchley Park on the extremely difficult task of decrypting German
communications encrypted with the Enigma machine. The Bletchley
Park team did succeed, and thus the Royal Navy became able to read
the content of all the Nazis' messages to U-boats in the North
Atlantic. It was a crucial turning point in the war. But a mere
seven years later, a young man shared Turing's bed for the night in
Manchester, and later helped someone burgle the house, and Turing
naively reported the theft to the police. The police reaction was
to arrest Turing, because they guessed what had been going on.
"Gross indecency" was the charge (it is the British legal euphemism
for cocksucking). Turing had a choice between serving prison time
or agreeing to chemical castration, a medicalized "cure" for his
presumed abnormality. He bore the latter for two years and then
took cyanide. The way British mid-20th-century sex law drove him to
suicide was genuinely something for the country to be ashamed of.
It was good to see the official apology (which hundreds of eminent
scientists had asked the Prime Minister to express).
Plus, as Pullum says, "That's how to say it ...: not a bunch of
evasive mumbling about how unfortunate it all was, but a simple 'We're
sorry.'"
References
1. http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page20571
2. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1733
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