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Comment by protothomas | Hacker News Reader

I think the point that the government is making here is not "...but it was the law at that time!" but rather "we will let our mistakes of the past stand, and rather than hide from them we will learn from them". There is perhaps the danger that by 'fixing' the past you can then forget about it.

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Agreed. There's been many atrocious things done in the past by almost every country, and it would be very simple to whitewash everything out of existence with pardons, however it doesn't change what happened or what resulted from it.

It's better to stand by your mistakes than to pretend they never happened.

It would not be, in any sense, a "whitewash", actually the reverse. A whitewash covers up mistakes. This would be an acknowledgement that the laws of the time were injust.

We have had an unequivocal apology, made on national television by the Prime Minister himself, saying that the conviction was "horrifying" and "utterly unfair". I think that counts as "an acknowledgement that the laws of the time were injust".

A pardon is a separate and distinct legal action, which is unwarranted.

Sure. But warranted or unwarranted, it's anything but a whitewash.

It is a whitewash. The treatment of the homosexual community at that time was horrendous. Pardoning his act because it's non-objectional today is stupid. Why not pardon all the Jews of the pogroms for having the wrong ethnicity.

It's whitewashing because the act of doing it is more offensive than simply leaving it as is. Pardoning Turing would be pardoning him for being gay and makes no correction for the horrendous treatment he received, which was the point of the apology.

An apology is what Turing deserved. A pardon is an insult to his memory.

I'm sorry, but you simply don't understand the meaning of the word "whitewash" http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/whitewash. You don't "whitewash" something by publicly apologizing for it or by pardoning someone who has been wronged. That's almost exactly the opposite of what the word "whitewash" actually means. When you "whitewash" something you DENY that it happened or try and BURY it.

I think they just refuse to admit a mistake by placing the blame on the historical context.

They have already issued a full apology (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/gordon-brown/617011...) which contains the following - "While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time, and we can't put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair, and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him. Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted, as he was convicted, under homophobic laws, were treated terribly."

I must say that the leading "While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time" qualification leaves a particularly unpleasant taste in my mouth. I am forced to agree with bad_user in this case.

I think that qualification is actually important: it was the law that was unjust, not just society. A government apology should acknowledge that it was the government that caused the problem there, not some random vigilantes. The full problem was not just that he was treated horribly, but that his treatment was not only legal but also actively enforced by the law.

While I concede it is possible that was the intent of that line, I think there could have certainly been a better way of conveying that rather point. Particularly, they could have plainly stated "the law itself was unjust", and dropped that weird "While...".

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