Tuesday 24 December 2013

Don't Say "Pardon?", Say "What?"

I would welcome the posthumous Royal Pardons of those two sometime Bishops of Rochester, Saint John Fisher, Catholic martyr of 1535 and after whom Cambridge's Fisher House is named, and Nicholas Ridley, Protestant martyr of 1555 and after whom Cambridge's Ridley Hall is named.

That would make about as much difference to anything as this Turing business will, even if it was a good excuse to have Baroness Trumpington on the Today programme. She probably knew Fisher and Ridley personally, too. 

There certainly ought not to be pardons of everyone convicted of gross indecency. That offence covered a wide range of acts, not all of them adult, not all of them consensual, and very far indeed from all of them private.

This cause would do its proponents no good, associating them with cottaging, with man-boy abuse, and so on. Such things were included under gross indecency.

No comments:

Post a Comment