Stonewall: New York Police Commissioner Apologises

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fountainhall

Stonewall: New York Police Commissioner Apologises

Post by fountainhall »

With the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots and the police action which sparked them looming on 28th June, New York's Police Commissioner has finally apologised for the police actions that evening.
Commissioner James O’Neill said on Thursday that “the actions taken by the NYPD were wrong” at the gay bar in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village neighborhood.

He called the actions and laws of the time, which prohibited homosexuality and just being in a gay bar could prompt an arrest “discriminatory” and said, “For that, I apologize.”

The apology comes just weeks ahead of the 50th anniversary of the raid and the rebellion it sparked on 28 June 1969. Bar patrons on the night, soon joined by others, fought back against officers, after frequent bar raids and arrests, and against a social order that kept gay life in the shadows.

. . . The Stonewall Inn, on the village’s famous Christopher Street, was declared a national monument under the Obama administration in 2016 and is still a busy bar and nightspot
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/ ... missioner-
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Re: Stonewall: New York Police Commissioner Apologises

Post by ceejay »

He should not have done, for the same reason that I should not have to apologise for British imperialism or any German under 80 should not have to apologise for the crimes of the Third Reich. We were not there, we did not do it, it was not us.
I despise this modern obsession with making insincere apologies for events long past where the participants are sometimes even all now dead. These apologies are demanded by interest groups whose primary interest is to establish a faux victimhood for themselves, as a stepping stone to claiming some sort of privileged status. Passive aggressive bullshit from them, pandered to by spineless politicians who are so scared of offending anyone that they will kiss any arse presented to them.
I do not wish to receive an apology for the laws, now repealed, that once persecuted gays in the UK. I have no intention of apologising for the Irish potato famine. I wish to live in the present, thank you very much.
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Re: Stonewall: New York Police Commissioner Apologises

Post by Gaybutton »

ceejay wrote: Fri Jun 07, 2019 7:50 pm He should not have done
I think ceejay makes a valid point. I can see publicly acknowledging things like that did happen, publicly stating that it was wrong, and possibly compensating victims who are still alive, but I see no reason to go any further than that.

Like ceejay, I think this sort of apology is an empty gesture, right up there with all the politicians who, after the latest gun massacre, tell us all about how their thoughts and prayers are with the victims, but do absolutely nothing about taking serious steps to prevent further incidents. Maybe their thoughts and prayers really are with the victims - for about 10 seconds . . .
fountainhall

Re: Stonewall: New York Police Commissioner Apologises

Post by fountainhall »

ceejay wrote: Fri Jun 07, 2019 7:50 pmI despise this modern obsession with making insincere apologies for events long past where the participants are sometimes even all now dead.
There are many scholarly and generally interesting articles on the internet about the value or otherwise of one state making an apology to another or to a specific group for events in the dim and distant past. I do agree that if you start down that road, where does it end? And how do we identify both who exactly was responsible and to whom the apologies should be directed?

Are Spain and Portugal responsible for all but wiping out the Aztec and Inca civilisations? Certainly both states wanted the gold and other wealth of their lands, but are they responsible for unknowingly bringing the diseases which accounted for vast numbers of deaths? Is Britain responsible for the deaths of millions of Chinese because it acquiesced and fought wars to advance the sale of opium as a means of saving their silver reserves in paying for much-in-demand Chinese exports? That practice was started by a non-government entity, the East India Company. It has not existed since the 1850s.

As one article points out,
it is hard not to take a dim view of European colonialism, entailing – as it did – theft, racism, cultural destruction, slavery and sometimes genocide. Yet merely recognising the violations of colonialism does not automatically lead to the conclusion that the states that once practised it should now apologise for their historical misdeeds.
Where I have a problem is when those affected by a specific action remain alive today. The British government's policy of sending "orphans" to underpopulated Australia as late as the 1960s was a despicable act, the more so since many of the children were born to single mothers forced as a result of British society's stigma to give them up for adoption. The children were then told unequivocally that their parents were dead. Far too many of these kids ended up in pretty dreadful servitude and subjected to physical and mental abuse. Many had their lives ruined. The apologies given by the Australian and British Prime Ministers ten years ago were, in my view, absolutely justified.

Closer to the objectives of this Board, though, if apologising for past misdeeds is regarded as wrong, I wonder how many here consider "Turing's Law" equally wrong. This is the name given to the posthumous pardon given by the British government in 2013 to the homosexual wartime code-breaker Alan Turing and extended in 2017 to up to 50,000 more homosexual men jailed under the same Victorian anti-sodomy laws that were finally repealed in 1967. Although most of these men had died, some remained alive, as are the descendants of those now dead. Is that pardon/virtual apology not acceptable?
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Re: Stonewall: New York Police Commissioner Apologises

Post by Gaybutton »

fountainhall wrote: Sat Jun 08, 2019 12:48 pm Is that pardon/virtual apology not acceptable?
In my opinion an official pardon is fine, but that is not the same as an apology. I believe the only ones that need to do any apologizing are the people who were responsible in the first place, if any are still alive.
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