A pardon too long in the making
by David Atkins
It’s it’s about damn time:
Queen Elizabeth II granted a rare “mercy pardon” Monday to Alan Turing, the computing and mathematics pioneer whose chemical castration for being gay drove him to suicide almost 60 years ago.
Turing was one of the leading scientific geniuses of the 20th century — the man who cracked the supposedly uncrackable Enigma code used by Nazi Germany in World War II and the man many scholars consider the father of modern computer science.
By the time he was 23, Turing had hypothesized what would become today’s computers — the Turing machine, which could emulate any computing device or program. Almost 80 years later, Turing machines are still used in theoretical computation.
In 1950, Turing came up with the famous Turing Test to determine whether a computer can be considered to have attained artificial intelligence.
But Turing was also gay at a time when that was a crime in Britain, and instead of being hailed as one of the crucial figures in defeating the Nazis, he was convicted of “gross indecency” in 1952 for having had sex with a man.
Conservatives are always on the wrong side of history. Always.
As depressing as the news can be, it’s heartening to think that if Alan Turing had been born just a few decades later, he could not only have lived an open and fruitful personal life, but he could even have married the man of his dreams in the state of Utah if he so chose. Some things really do get better.
If anyone wants to send something via snail mail, the address is on the column on the left.