Which I do believe was my original point.

Under the (IMO horribly wrong) law of his country, Turing was guilty.

And my point being, the law was wrong, if not completely immoral. The state simply has no business in regulating people's private lives in such a manner. I expect HMG to apologise in the same way I'd expect the Kremlin to say sorry for being murderous, ravenous bastards.

Exactly, I was planning on going to America with my first girlfriend, it was shocking to realise that, while at home, we could have sex, in America we would have had to wait another 5 years!

The same for drinking and smoking, a friend here was 16 and was shocked on his exchange trip to America that he wasn't allowed to go into a pub and order beer or smoke a cigarette...

It isn't just sex, many things we take for granted in the UK are either not applicable in other countries, or what we do in England is illegal in other countries or you have to be much older...

Shift the time point and those things we take for granted would be illegal in England - and there are other things which we used to be able to do, which we can't today; and there are plenty of examples of things I'm no longer able to do in England that I could have done when I was younger!

I feel sorry for Turing, and people like Oscar Wilde, while we are at it, but revising history to pardon them today doesn't do them any good and it tends to whitewash the things we learnt from in the past... And if we pardon Turing, shouldn't we erase all criminal records for everybody who was arrested for a same sex relationship in the history of our country? Why should he get preferential treatment?

If it is erased from our history, how will future generations learn from our forefathers mistakes?

I'm really in two minds on this. To be honest, I would expect 99.9% of people were probably not even aware of his private life and that he was arrested for homosexuality... It certainly wasn't anything any news agency has deemed worthy of reporting, when talking about what a genius he is...

What would the apology bring? It won't make him feel any better, it won't change anything and we, today, know that what the government did was wrong.

I agree with the historical POV from big_D. That fact that he was arrested for 'indecent acts' was a reflection of the time he lived in. Just because the laws then are considered wrong now doesn't mean that they were wrong then. We have plenty of laws that are wrong now. Are gonna argue in front of a judge that because in 100 years' time the law will be seen as nonsense and wrong, that you shouldn't be punished now?

Surely such a pardon should include everyone else who was treated equally as bad. Why should anyone be singled out?

Today rape and murder is immoral, but what if they become acceptable parts of our culture in the future? Should every rapist and murderer from today be pardoned in the future?
On going the other way, should we retrospectivly prosecute past genberations for doing things we wouldn't deem moral now? The Romans killed disfigured babies when they were born, should we put that up to trial?

As I said, a pardon would be nice, but unless we are about to judge the whole of our history, why should it happen?
A recognition for Mr Turing's work would be far more appropriate I would have thought.

That's exactly what I was going on about in my last post. It's a ridiculous thing, isn't it?

I bet hes happy.. oh hes dead so he wont know.
He was guilty of an offense under the laws of the land at that time. The law may beconsidered to be wrong now but then society decreed that it was a just law. Its called Democracy.

I still look at it like the way we pardon deserters in the wars etc - we may as well do it

He doesn't actually seem to have been pardoned, which is obviously a whole other kettle of fish come any further developments...

Civil rights trump democracy, always. I'd rather live in a civil-rights respecting dictatorship than a democracy where paediatricians get hanged, there are CCTV cameras in my living room and we ban homosexuality, anyone who even looks at a child needs a CRB check etc.

isnt that an oxymoron?

Civil rights as defined now were not civil rights as defined then. To use modern values on a previous time when those values were not accpeted as the norm is false. It doesnt matter if we decide now they are wrong, back then they were right.

I disagree, slavery or ownership of another human being is never acceptable, I don't really care if it was back then, that doesn't make it right. It was the norm. to kill jews in Germany during WWII, is that acceptable then? Should we be judging Nazi Germany by our own standards?

The State has no business legislating against a person's sexual preference, it never did.

Today it may be unacceptable. In a different time period it has been acceptable to society to have slavery.


It does if that society has judged it to be right.
It doesn't matter what we think now about it being wrong, because we are judging them on todays standards of our society.

Just like we judge the Nazi's by today's standards. It's OK though, killing jews/homosexuals/gypsies was OK at the time.

no it wasnt and thus there was something called the Nuremberg trials.