Alan Turing was a brilliant English mathematician who helped the Allies win World War II.
Working as a cryptographer at the now famous Bletchley Park complex he used his incredible focus and intelligence to crack the seemingly impossible codes of the German Enigma Machine. By locking himself in his room for days at a time he managed to reverse engineer the Enigma Machine — a stroke of pure genius that allowed the British and their allies to anticipate attacks and other vital information, changing the course of the war.
He’s also known as the father of computer science. Time named him one of the 100 most important people of the 20th century.
[E]veryone who taps at a keyboard, opening a spreadsheet or a word-processing program, is working on an incarnation of a Turing machine.
Alan Turing was gay. He killed himself on June 8, 1952, by eating a bite of an apple laced with cyanide. But why? We’ve seen a lot of theories from the right on why gay kids are killing themselves. Could any of them apply?
Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association might say it’s because society was pushing too hard for people to be gay:
It must be pointed out that homosexual activists are not wholly innocent in these tragedies either. Homosexuals cannot reproduce so they must recruit. Part of the agenda of groups like GLSEN (the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network) is to urge students at younger and younger ages to come out and declare a disordered sexual preference. Sexually confused youth are pressured into locking into a sexual identity far before they are mature enough to do so.
Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Council might argue that society was too accepting of homosexuality:
Peter Sprigg, senior fellow for policy studies at the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C., said the rash September suicides by gays might be linked to the students believing they were born gay. “That creates hopelessness,” he said. “It is more loving and compassionate to say you don’t have to be gay for the rest of your lives.”
His colleague Tony Perkins might back him up:
Some homosexuals may recognize intuitively that their same-sex attractions are abnormal–yet they have been told by the homosexual movement, and their allies in the media and the educational establishment, that they are “born gay” and can never change. This–and not society’s disapproval–may create a sense of despair that can lead to suicide.
Could Turing have killed himself because homosexuality was illegal in Britain?
Could he have done it because police discovered his sexual orientation while investigating a burglary of his home, and he was convicted of gross indecency?
Could it have been because in order to avoid a prison term he submitted to chemical castration by the government via female hormones?
No, of course not. As Tony Perkins makes clear, society’s disapproval does not cause suicide. Alan Turing must have killed himself because Britain was just too damn accepting.
Nice.
What’s also telling about Turing’s case and the anti-gay movement is how they’re still attached to these cockamamie psychological propositions that homosexuality has something to do with gender confusion.
The ex-gay approach has refined the brutality of chemical castration into a form of mental neutering. The desperate subjects of the ex-gay treatment are reassured their sexual orientation is some form of pathology. The end result is typically a perpetual struggle with self imposed celibacy.
Should someone suffering with that struggle find the burden too much to bear and end his or her life I guess the anti-gay exponents would say that it’s the fault of not enough loathing for and self loathing by homosexual people.
My best friend in high school tried to kill himself because too many cheerleaders were dating him, the cool kids invited him to too many parties, and the jocks never beat him up. Nobody told him that he didn’t need to be a nerd his whole life; they made him think he could just go on being good at math FOREVER, that it might even be good for him.
They should have beat the shit out of him and snubbed him. That would have saved him from years of grief!
I bring up Alan Turing every time a class of mine talks about chemical castration.
So what page from Christ’s play-book did Tony-boy take the rhetoric of blame-the-victim?
That’s what I thought. What an asshat!
Although I don’t think that Turing’s having helped DEFEAT the Nazis is going to be much of a selling point for NOM.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Lawrence Lomenzo, Gay News Digest. Gay News Digest said: The Tragic Suicide of Alan Turing http://ow.ly/2USin [...]
Whoo-hoo! Damn right. Brilliant post, Rob!
[...] Gallagher wants to know if she has blood on her hands. Jimmy Swaggart. Peter Sprigg. Tony Perkins. Bryan Fischer. Linda Harvey. Whether you’re calling us an abomination, or phrasing it [...]
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[...] not using that word) in this post explaining why folks like Jimmy Swaggart, Peter Sprigg, Tony Perkins, Bryan Fischer, and Linda Harvey bear more responsibility for gay teen suicide than the teens [...]