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Friday, March 29
The Indiana Daily Student

opinion

COLUMN: Reconciling history's low points must be done responsibly

Britain announced Thursday its plan to posthumously pardon gay and bisexual men for homosexuality, which was a criminally punishable offense in Britain until the late 20th century.

Among the ranks of potentially pardonable British celebrities is writer Oscar Wilde, who endured two years of imprisonment and hard labor as punishment for sodomy.

While Britain’s plan seems a well-intentioned effort to mend historical atrocities toward the gay and bisexual community, activists note the problems inherent in this move toward posthumous pardon.

For some, the pardons do not go far enough in making recompense for past offenses and instead suggest a lingering sense of accusation, as if there’s an actual crime to be forgiven.

The pardons also are not universal, but rather conditional. The cases are evaluated on an individual basis, and posthumous pardons are granted only if a case meets certain criteria.

The gesture of granting pardons superficially seeks to repair the abuses of the past, when, in reality, we cannot expunge the actions of our ancestors. The efforts dually imply a pardoning of Britain’s own offenses and a partial rewriting of the nation’s historical records.

While watching the PBS documentary “Hamilton’s America” on Friday night, I found myself considering this historical conundrum — this clash between our desire to repair the past and our inability to atone for the offenses of even revered historical icons.

In the documentary, historians and artistic creators of the musical “Hamilton” discussed the complexities and paradoxes that underpin historical representations of the Founding Fathers, many of whom owned people as slaves and contradicted their own claims that “all men are created equal.”

The commentators in the documentary emphasized representing both the good and the bad of history, including both the achievements and the offenses of those who have come before us.

When looking at history, it’s important to neither offer pardon nor ignore contributions, but to instead accept the potential paradox inherent in historical characters and their countries.

A similar framework applies to the government’s actions in Britain. The posthumous pardons risk trivializing the abuses toward thousands of gay and bisexual men and altering the collective memory of the entire era.

Yet, by restructuring records to remove erroneous character stains, the act also endeavors to repair the historical record for people whose stories were misrepresented during their lifetimes.

The problem of the pardons is a multivalent predicament, with both sides attempting to reconcile the present moment of activism with the past of criminal convictions.

The LGBT+ community should have the final say in the government’s intervention in historical records, since, above all, it’s their history that’s being represented and potentially rewritten.

Amid current advocacy efforts, we need to consider the implications of historical revision on movements for equal rights and social progress — implications that first and foremost affect the LGBT+ community.

Ultimately, we need to transform this effort to revise history into a new activism, aimed instead at revising the present.

As Oscar Wilde himself wrote, “Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.”

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