A private members bill aiming to erase the criminal records of gay men convicted of now-defunct sexual offences was talked out by Tories in the House of Commons this afternoon.
If passed, it would have cleared the way for a pardon of nearly 50,000 men living with convictions for consensual homosexual activity.This is honestly so important. The people that paved the way for us queer young people are still stuck with criminal records for having queer sex or ‘wearing the wrong clothes’ in just about every country and we need to fucking organize and support them and realize these political games for what they are: an attack on our queer elders.
A note on this if that’s ok! Just because I’ve seen a couple of posts going around disputing this.
For those who don’t know the uk gov has passed a law that they are claiming to be the same – it isn’t. It means that the thousands of people who are still stuck with these criminal records will have to apply personally to receive their pardon. As you can imagine this would be extremely stressful and potentially embarrassing, having to drag up all the shame from years and years prior, and many people simply won’t do it. In a lot of cases they are elderly and vulnerable and for everyone this is something they have already had to go through once. Its shaming. Its shameful. It’s gross.
I have seen a few posts on here/twitter/fb etc going ‘oh but they did pass another one that means they’ll be pardoned’ and no, it doesn’t.
why would you want to make people apply for pardon that seems like so much effort on the part of the government too. you could solve this simply by having all records expunged at one time with no additional effort but these losers hate gay people SO MUCH that they would prefer to waste time and manpower expunging records one by one over the next SIXTY YEARS (or longer, because it’s much more likely that family will push for posthumous pardons due to the whole re-exposure to trauma shit), and force people charged under unconstitutional laws to go through public shaming to get their records cleared of an offense that should have been cleared DECADES ago.
this is genuinely oppression in action: sabotaging everyone and wasting money just to fuck over 50,000 people.
Tories filibuster ‘Turing Bill’ – denying pardons to 50,000 living gay men | Left Foot Forward
QueerAnarchism 