The BBC is reporting that thousands of Britons are now calling upon their government to posthumously pardon and knight Alan Turing. If you don’t know his story, you should.
Alan Turing is one of the founders of the field of Computer Science, which is the study of the mathematical laws underlying computation. He proved, among other things, that there are some problems that cannot be solved by a computational device. Not only was Turing’s work theoretically impressive and groundbreaking, it was also of incredible importance to the allied effort during the second world war. The British intelligence ran an outfit called Bletchley Park, whose sole purpose was to intercept German and Japaneses messages, break open the encryption schemes, and use the gleaned secrets to help the Allies. The Germans had a complicated encryption computer called ‘Enigma,’ which they believed to be unbreakable. There was a herculean effort on the part of the allies to break open this encryption system, and it succeeded. Alan Turing devised a machine called ‘the Bombe’ which could reverse engineer the settings on the enigma machine, to help decode its messages. It is entirely possible that without the efforts at Bletchley Park, the war might have lasted a long longer or ended on an entirely different note.
Alan Turing was not only a genius who worked tirelessly to save the free world, he was a homosexual living in an age when homosexuality was illegal. In 1952 he was charged with having a homosexual relationship, and he accepted a sentence of chemical castration via estrogen injection. His security clearance was stripped, he was forbidden form working at Bletchley Park, and a year later, he killed himself. Now, I suppose an apology on behalf of the British government would be nice, but it wouldn’t accomplish much. After reading the story of Alan Turing, I realized that there is an entire class of people who live as second class citizens. If we would like to honor the memory of Alan Turing, the best response is to end the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy and to stop treating a group of our fellow citizens as if there were something wrong with them. I am not homosexual and I do not really understand what causes some people to be so, but to me the reason is irrelevant - there’s simply no excuse for discriminating against someone because of whom they happen to be attracted to.