George Carlin on religious people on abortion and homosexuals:
it was forced “chemical castration” or something right? I don’t recall any medical procedures being performed on him, but yeah it’s still fucking horrid.
Classic british experience really.
generally in my mind, a “medical procedure” would be something like a surgery. Chemical castration, unless injected would essentially just be a prescribed drug, or in the case of an injection, an injection. That’s relatively minor compared to a literal surgical castration in my mind.
It wasn’t just the British system it was just the culture at the time for everywhere. The United States was far further behind the times at that point in time Britain.
Segregation was still a thing in the 1940s to the point at which American soldiers coming to the UK had to have lessons in how not to be racist. Gay rights weren’t even on anyone’s radar back then.
It wasn’t just the British system it was just the culture at the time for everywhere.
France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway…
I don’t mean to say that Britain was some barbaric backwater with this. You are certainly right that this treatment was common in other states, even if not universal. But it was very much a case of Britain doing something that was no longer regarded as essential to the behavior of a civilized state to one of their most brilliant minds, a man who was a hero who saved thousands of British lives at minimum by his efforts. It’s a reminder of how brutish we can be by adhering to established norms without consideration of their reasoning.
The United States was far further behind the times at that point in time Britain.
Speaking as an American, I might suggest that using the social norms of the US of the first half of the 20th century as a yardstick might be setting the bar a bit low.
Turing aside, the world simply treated gay people horribly altogether.
Gay men were victims of the holocaust much like many other groups but Germany wouldn’t recognize this until 4 decades later in the 1980s. We know what the British did to Turing but the U.S. acted similarly due to the Lavender Scare which compared gay people to communists and enacted its own witch hunts for them.
I remember reading somewhere that upon liberation from concentration camps, many gay individuals were simply transferred to prisons from their home country for the crime of being gay. The Nazis were terrifyingly effective in branding exactly what kind of “undesirable” you were:
Image source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_concentration_camp_badge
im sorry asocial? What the fuck does this mean in the context of the nazis? Were people who didn’t actively socialize considered a threat somehow?
Asocial was a very broad term - anyone they thought was not sufficiently contributing to society, essentially.