Nicholas Neighbors
09/11/09
1:09pm
British Prime Minister Gordon Browned displayed his deep apologies for the mistreatment of Alan Turning, a homosexual man who helped during World War II as a mathematician that cracked Nazi Germany’s Enigma encryption machine which was considered to be turning point in the war. Turning’s mistreatment came in 1952, when he was convicted of having sex with a man and was offered a choice between prison and the injection of female hormones. Oestrogen, the hormone given and the choice of the two sentences had a side effect of causing men to develop breast. Turning’s conviction led to his loss of security clearance and banned him from doing any work for the GCHQ. At the age of 41, Turning killed himself by eating an apple laced with cyanide. Homosexuality was illegal in Britain until 1967. A petition, made online, drew 30,000 supporters who agreed that an apology was in order. Of Turning’s accomplishments, he worked as a wartime code breaker, cracking many of Germany’s secret codes to help reveal the settings for the Enigma machine. He also worked on artificial intelligence and was considered the “father of computing.”
Turnings death is a tragedy. Sexual orientation has been seen today as more of an open topic, gaining a lot more social tolerance and less discrimination that it once received in the past. Because of Turnings early death, he wasn’t able to live to his full potential as the man was obviously a genius. I don’t believe in discrimination for any reason, such as race, gender, or sexual orientation and seeing someone with such great potential die at an early age is such a loss. Before the “legalization” of same sex couples, people were convicted and treated as such for simply living life how they believe they should or want to. Seeing all the hardships that a person who is “different” has to go through, make me appreciate the society I am in today, even though it is not necessarily completely open and accepting, it is moving more toward that direction, and soon, everyone will have the right to be free.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090911/ap_on_re_eu/eu_britain_codebreaker
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