This pardon might not gone through if certain objectors had their way.
The argument against the pardon was that out of fortynine thousand cases, it must be inevitable that some of those prosecutions were for sexual acts which are still illegal today due to the age of the younger partner. For the sake of that small percentage of cases the opponents wanted to block all the other pardons. To go back in time and retest all of those convictions would take too long and cost too much money. So the 99% have to suffer for the sins of the 1%. Where have I heard that before?
The winning counter argument is an interesting one.
In a time like 1960, since there was no age of consent for homosexuals, there was no difference in law between sex with a fourteen year old and sex with a sixty year old. They were both identical offences with identical punishments. How could a man in 1960 know what the age of consent was going to be in forty years time?. If the offence was the same, the pardon must be the same.
So justice prevailed in the end, but not without a fight.