Posted on 04/16/2016 7:43:27 PM PDT by Cyberman
The head of Britain's digital espionage agency has apologized for the organization's historic prejudice against homosexuals, saying it failed to learn from the treatment of World War II codebreaker Alan Turing.
In a rare public speech, GCHQ chief Robert Hannigan told a gathering organized by the rights group Stonewall that the agency's ban on homosexuals had caused long-lasting psychological damage to many and hurt the agency because talented people were excluded from working there.
"The fact that it was common practice for decades reflected the intolerance of the times and the pressures of the Cold War, but it does not make it any less wrong and we should apologize for it," Hannigan said Friday at the conference organized by Stonewall, which campaigns for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality.
The speech offered a poignant tribute to Turing, the gay computer science pioneer and architect of the effort to crack Nazi Germany's Enigma cipher. Turing was convicted of indecency in 1952 and stripped of his security clearance. He later committed suicide....
(Excerpt) Read more at nbcnews.com ...
Spy chief should go kiss and make up with each of them.
This run-in happened years after Turing left the service, didn’t it?
One day Western society will discover again why it treated sexual aberrations with alarm. One day. After a mania has struck society nigh unto what struck Sodom and Gomorrah, with behavior that has long departed from the consensual and gone into the bullying.
Hannigan is full of it. He has no sense of the reality of the times where Turing’s sexual peccadillos would have allowed the Reds to blackmail him for every kind of secret Turing could access. It didn’t have the first bleeding thing to do with intolerance or other modern concoction of cultural downfall.
Homosexuality was considered a serious security breach back then. Rightly so as it made them liable to black mail.
Even promiscuity, which is a problem that will carry over into a supposedly gender-blind environment. “Gay marriage” makes this even worse, not better. And oh boy do they dish. Any enemy would make hay of that.
Quit apologizing for everything someone else did. I you had no control over what someone before you did, you have no reason to prostrate yourself at the foot of political correctness.
Stop it!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhQGzeiYS_Q
In before the Monty Python joke?
Correct. We’ve had a preview with Bradley/Chelsea Manning. Some people are fundamentally unstable and, by extension, unfit for sensitive positions. Britain has never recovered from Kim Philby.
We lost a lot of pilots in Korea because the British gave the Russians the best jet engine in the world at the time.
Which is precisely why the soviets recruited gay spies.
Who knows how many Russians we (the west) failed to compromise because of our prudishness?
Yeah, the way it was portrayed in a biopic was that a guy he effectively trolled, burgled him after the tryst.
Turing went and reported it...when buggery was still illegal.
He eventually committed suicide by spreading cyancide on an apple, climbing into bed, and biting into it.
A math professor I had said Turing was a pretty strange dude. One day during the war, Turing refused to work because he missed some sort of kids show on the Beeb. They had to get his mother to call and tell him Basil the Clown, or whomever, made it safely through that day's show.
Right??? Turing was a brilliant light and may have given more to the world.
Asshats.
My wife and I watched The Imitation Game movie when it came out. We didn’t realize that the movie was some type of Gay propaganda movie. When we got back we fact checked what we learned from the movie. Very little about the movie was accurate.
Homosexuality was considered a serious security breach back then. Rightly so as it made them liable to black mail.
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I was stationed in D.C. in the mid 60s and I remember when a queer member of the Johnson administration was “outed”. It was quite the scandal at the time but I cannot remember said queer’s name.
The running joke at the time that was the White House phone number had been changed to “JOhnson 812”.
Walter Jenkins.
Thanks.
Didn’t Turing molest young boys?
I've never seen any evidence for that, and I have studied the man pretty extensively. He's one of my childhood heroes - although I do not endorse his personal sexual choices (and was unaware of them when I was a child and learning about him), he was critical in keeping the world free.
However, the relationship for which he was prosecuted for indecency was with a 19-year-old - a minor in 1952 - and it is quite likely Turing would have not been prosecuted if his partner had been 21 - by the 1950s, it really was rare for the CPS to proceed in 'consenting adults' cases - he clearly had no respect for the law.
Irony they gave him gender changing drugs to shape him out and it lead to his suicide (he was an athlete and estrogen wrecked him), the same stuff that they now advocate in name of love for little kids
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