Alan Turing is considered to be the father of computer science. During the World War II Turning worked in the British Communication headquarters at Bletchley Park where he was instrumental in solving the problem of the Enigma machine.
As well as laying down the foundations for the personal computer Turing considered moral dilemmas in computing well before anyone had the technology capable of causing these problems. In 1950 he thought up a test to determine whether or not a computer had developed artificial intelligence. This is known as the Turing test, and involved someone engaging in an instant message type conversation with a number of people without being able to tell which one wasn't really a human (Turing, 1950).
It wasn't until 1980 that John Searle showed that a computer could follow the rules of language to devise a reply without understanding it (Searle, 1980).
Two years after coming up with this idea Turing was burgled by a nineteen year old boy with whom he had had consensual sex. He reported the crime and in doing so was forced to admit to his sexuality. He was charged with gross indecency under Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885.
This law, implemented by Attorney-General Richard Webster, was also designed to protect women and children from sexual abuse and so it was important that it extended into the domestic sphere. Yet it required witness testimony and so could be used for blackmail and extortion. Just over 50 years earlier, in 1895, Oscar Wilde had been given two years of hard labour under this law. Wilde's time in prison had severely damaged his health and he died, at the age of 46, just three years after being released.
Turing was given the choice between suffering Wilde's fate or choosing to take oestrogen injections for a year to decrease his libido. He chose the injections, they made him impotent and permanently deformed his body, his security clearance was revoked and he lost his job.
In 1952, aged 41, he committed suicide by eating an apple laced with cyanide, perhaps influenced by Snow White, the favourite film of his friend Godel. It wasn't until fifteen years later that consensual sex in the privacy of your own home was decimalised in the UK.
There have been a number of historic arguments as to why we should ban homosexuality. Lord Devlin (1959), a knight and British judge in the late '50s believed that if enough people were offended by something then it should be outlawed. This was because he thought that society was bound together by a shared morality and he believed that intolerance of homosexuality was one of these shared values. This view seems redundant in the modern age as an intellectual way to attack homosexuality.
Yet Michael Levin (1997), a professor of philosophy in New York, argues that heterosexual people's disgust of homosexuals is so great that it would be wrong to force them to have to work together. Levin argues that this disgust might be biological in origin since he believed that homosexuality was a disease, this is because he believed that homosexuals were intrinsically unhappy. This claim was supported by his theory that each bodily organ has a purpose which must be fulfilled in order for people to be happy. According to this sex with someone of the same gender is not morally wrong, but never having heterosexual sex would mean not fulfilling the needs of your body and this would make you intrinsically unhappy. He dismisses obvious counter examples such as celibate priests because the priest chooses celibacy for a 'higher purpose'. Needless to say, these arguments seem childish at best.
Sometimes people have used Kant's Categorical Imperative (1785) to justify banning homosexuality. This states that the morality of an action can be determined if we think about what the consequences would be if everyone were to do it. Lying is always wrong because if everyone lied it would have terrible consequence for society. The fact that if everyone were homosexual then no children would be born is often used to explain why it is unnatural. However, I think this use of the Categorical Imperative is wrong, it would be terrible if everyone were postmen and there were no farmers, however this does not mean that people shouldn't be free to be postmen. A universal law could be simply that no one can enforce sexual control over consenting adults who are not harming anyone, since a world where we were not in control of our own sex lives would be terrible, this is analogous to Mill's harm principle.
I believe that gay people should have the same rights as all other people: to have sex, to marry and to adopt children. To not allow this implies that homosexuals are something less than human and I think that it is this view which is most damaging to society.
