The wheels of justice turn slowly, but they still grind exceeding fine. And they took one more agonizingly slow turn the other day when Her Majesty's government finally pardoned those innocents convicted for homosexual acts long ago in a darker age.
"This is a truly momentous day," proclaimed Sam Gyimah, the minister of justice in Her Majesty's government across the pond in London, where some measure of the real thing was at last being doled out. It was too late for Alan Turing except in memoriam, for he'd died in 1954 at the age of 41 after eating a cyanide-laced apple, doubtless driven to it by prosecutors who were more persecutors. For he'd been accused and convicted of "gross indecency" for following his natural instincts, which were denounced as unnatural by a government and society he served patriotically during the Second World War.
A pioneer in the early days of computer science, aka artificial intelligence, Alan Turing broke what the Nazis considered their unbreakable coding machine, Enigma, by the power of pure mathematical reasoning. He worked it all out in an obscure hut at Bletchley Park in London, and none other than Winston Churchill credited his contribution to the war effort with shortening that terrible conflict by years. But after the war, this hero of it was stripped of his security clearance and obliged to take a course of hormones to "cure" himself of homosexuality, then considered a disease by medical pseudo-authorities.
By now Alan Turing has been recognized as what he was--a mathematical genius and true patriot--and those who pursued him have been shown to be what they were too: self-deluded inquisitors. Pardon them, too, for they had no idea they were doing evil and, somehow even worse, calling it good.
Editorial on 02/03/2017