Friday, October 19, 2001

Private life should not overpower public service
Commentary by Morgan Landry

Some of history’s greatest battles were not fought on the battlefield, but in the mind.

During World War II, one such battle was decoding Nazi messages. One of the winners of this battle, the forgotten soldier, was Alan Turing.

Bob Doran, head of the mathematics department, often says, “Success is making everyone who crosses your path successful.”

Turing not only accomplished that, but he made successes out of people he had never met.

Turing was a brilliant mathematician and computer scientist. His long list of accomplishments included designing the concepts for the modern computer, but that was nothing compared to how he helped win an important battle against the Nazis.

When the Nazis sent important military messages to each other, they encoded the messages in their Enigma cipher. Not only was the cipher hard to break, the Nazis kept changing it. When they found out the Allies broke the cipher, they figured someone stole it from them. After all, no one could crack the Enigma cipher on their own.

No one, that is, but Alan Turing. It has been said that his winning ideas helped shorten the war and led to the Allied victory. So why haven’t most people heard of him?

Turing was honored after the war, until the public learned he was gay.

He went from hero to criminal. He was convicted of the crime of homosexuality in 1952. Instead of going to prison, away from his work, he was submitted to hormone shots intended to neutralize his sex drive.

Most importantly, his work could no longer include cracking ciphers. This shift in attitude so depressed Turing that he committed suicide in 1954.

The lesson to be learned here is people are willing to condemn and forget even the greatest soldier because of his private actions off the battlefield.

The gay, lesbian and bisexual community has made great strives toward equality.

However, there are still people, like the ones who removed the pink flags representing homosexual Holocaust victims at last year’s memorial, who want Alan Turing to be forgotten.

Meanwhile, these same people enjoy using computers based on Turing’s ideas in a Hitler-free world Turing helped create, refusing to see the irony of their actions. They benefit from the mental soldier’s victory while pretending he never existed.

They excuse themselves by arguing Turing’s sexual orientation was immoral. The point is recognizing the simple truth that on the battlefield, Turing was a brilliant soldier whose victories helped save the world from Nazi rule, and that this soldier should never have been forgotten.

Morgan Landry is a junior computer information science and business major from Fort Worth. She can be contacted at (m.e.landry@student.tcu.edu).