Alan Turing, The Imitation Game, and marriage equality – Josh Withers Celebrant

I’m on a flight to Bali writing this and have just gotten around to watching The Imitation Game, a movie about a Professor that stops a war.

I’ll let you research or watch the movie to learn more about Alan Turing’s remarkable, extraordinarily influential, but depressingly short life.

Apart from sitting in awe at Alan’s work I finished the movie with so much sadness over Alan’s final years.

He was a homosexual man who lived in denial of his true self until he was “caught”, was chemically castrated for his “crime” and then took his life a year later.

In his era 49,000 men were charged for indecency, aka homosexuality. Since then even more have taken their lives, been bullied, hurt and abused because of how they love and how they live.

Citizens of the earth have this thing where they need to devalue people’s extraordinary contributions to society for crazy and totally illegitimate reasons, like:

Even today we systematically enforce the humiliation, bullying, and degradation of homosexual people, whilst devaluing their contribution to society, by blocking same-sex marriage in the Australian government.

Marriage has nothing to do with reproduction, genitals, or intercourse.

Marriage IS a union between two people entered into voluntarily for life. Two people that have decided to tackle this fragile life together instead of doing it alone.

I can’t help but feel that we all have a valuable, amazing, world-changing contribution to make and some of us build ceilings over others because of these ridiculous ideas.

RIP Alan Turing.

This content was originally published here.