World News Korner

Alan Turing, WWII codebreaker and father of the computer, granted rare royal pardon for the crime of being a homosexual.

Courtesy of Reuters:

Mathematician Alan Turing, who helped Britain win World War Two by cracking Nazi Germany's "unbreakable" Enigma code, was granted a rare royal pardon on Tuesday for a criminal conviction for homosexuality that led to his suicide.

Turing's electromechanical machine, a forerunner of modern computers, unraveled the code used by German U-boats in the Atlantic. His work at Bletchley Park, Britain's wartime codebreaking centre, was credited with shortening the war.

However, he was stripped of his job and chemically castrated with injections of female hormones after being convicted of gross indecency in 1952 for having sex with a man. Homosexual sex was illegal in Britain until 1967.

Turing killed himself in 1954, aged 41, with cyanide.

Justice Minister Chris Grayling said the pardon from Queen Elizabeth would come into effect immediately and was a fitting tribute to "an exceptional man with a brilliant mind".

Without this great man we may have lost the war.

And without his contribution to modern day computing, I may not have been able to share this long overdue good news with all of you.

Remember when next you hear a conservative go on and on about the "good old days" that those old days were not good for everybody. And the times we are living in today are the ones that progressives have been fighting to drag us to for decades.

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