So, Gordon Brown has issued an apology to Alan Turing, an eminently sensible thing to do and I suppose from a political point of view a "no-brainer" for him. Another religiously inspired prejudice apologised for, as the ethics of our society evolve beyond our delusional need for supernatural intervention.
For those interested in what the PM said, here is the text in full reproduced from the number 10 web site.
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.
4 comments:
I was listening to Radio 4 this morning and they were discussing Gordon Brown's apology.
There were so many brilliant tortured people who have suffered at the hands of these typically religiously-motivated "ethics" concerning people's sexuality: Walt Whitman, Francis Bacon, Lord Byron, Roland Barthes, Wittgenstein, Keynes, D.H. Lawrence, etc.
And then there are all the non-famous people who have to keep large areas of their lives under wraps in order to not be excluded or incur censure from others based on their sexuality. I hope this small contribution from Brown paves the way for equality even further.
Hi Lisa, I agree, practically speaking this is a somewhat pointless act, symbolically though, its very important.
As a species we are our own worst enemies.
I can't argue that Christians haven't played a part in discrimination against homosexuals. Of course they have. Not sure about Turing's conviction though. It took place in an atmosphere of fear about homosexuals and their links to the Soviet Union, and one where homosexuals were regarded as being a security risk. Hardly religious.
Take the Soviet Union's criminalisation of homosexuality, for example. Not an example of religiously-motivated ethics. The criminalisation of homosexuality was removed after the fall of the Soviet Union, and therefore after the fall of an officially atheist establishment. Homosexuals were persecuted under the Nazis, as were Jews, under a scientific (shockingly distorted Darwinian) justification, not a religious one.
As far as I can see the habit of repressing and persecuting people who are "other" is shared by people of, as trendy Christians would say, "all faiths and none".
I see Gordon Brown's act as pointless because it's costless to him. An apology has to cost something, but he used the apology as an attempt, at least in part, to play up New Labour - in other words to try to get some gain from Alan Turing's treatment. If he's going to apologise for all the harm the British establishment has done over the years he's got a long long way to go - commercial matters such as slavery and the invasion of India, religious ones such as the repression of Catholics until the 19th century, political ones such as the internment of German Jews in the Second World War, the betrayal of Iraqui interpreters... but if he wants to do something useful, he could slip a couple of million from the Bankers' Slush Fund towards Bletchley Park. I'm sure they'd find something useful to do with it.
Hi G, I think you are right about the political landscape in England at that time. Homosexuality was a vehicle by which many people were blackmailed into giving up information; inbound and outbound. Of course, if it wasn't illegal or stigmatised then that avenue would not have existed for those willing to exploit it.
My point was more to do with the underlying justification for making it illegal or even considering it“unnatural” (modern Biology has since shown this not to be of course); there are clear warrants against it in the Abrahamic faiths (Leviticus 18:22 for example) , but these seem awfully cherry picked and based on ignorance of the science. Clearly some societies take these texts more or less seriously and I wouldn't be so naive to think that religion is the only source of wonky morality in the world, bad and mad people exist in all shapes and sizes and when they get power it's a problem for us all.
In the case of the soviet union, all kinds of factors were at play there, personality cults, totalitarianism, ideological dogma; I think you would be hard pressed to show a causal link between what went on there and Atheism specifically, since Atheism itself has no associated dogma or scripture to warrant anything at all. I think it's more likely that the regimes wanted to exert total control over the population and eliminate any perceived threat to that control (like religion)
I agree about the apology, it's pretty meaningless from the point of view of an apology in the sense you suggest; it is a reinforcement of our laws and morality though which I suppose can't be a bad thing. It would certainly be fantastic if some Government or lottery cash were diverted to Bletchley Park, I believe it's all privately funded currently, which seems like shocking neglect of a great asset to me.
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