U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered the Navy to remove the name of gay rights icon and military veteran Harvey Milk from one of its ships. The renaming of military ships is a rare occurrence and generally considered taboo.
A military official said the decision to remove Milk’s name during Pride Month is intentional and part of “reestablishing the warrior culture” in the military, according to Military.com.
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In 2012, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors urged the then-secretary of the Navy to name a ship after Milk, who served for four years in the Navy, partly as a diving officer on the submarine rescue ship USS Kittiwake during the Korean War, before receiving an “other than honorable” discharge due to allegations of homosexuality.
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In 2016, the Navy announced that they would name several new ships after Milk and other civil rights icons, including suffragist Lucy Stone, abolitionist Sojourner Truth, and racial justice champion John Lewis.
A defense official told Military.com that Hegseth ordered Navy Secretary John Phelan to remove Milk’s name from the ship. “The official also said that the timing of the announcement — occurring during Pride Month — was intentional,” the publication wrote.
The memo reviewed by Military.com stated that the ship’s renaming was in “alignment with [the president, Hegseth, and Phelan’s] priorities of reestablishing the warrior culture.” The memo said that the ship’s new name would eventually be announced aboard the USS Constitution, the oldest commissioned Navy ship.
The Navy is also reportedly considering renaming other ships, including ones named after the Supreme Court’s first Black Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first Jewish female Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Civil War abolitionist Harriet Tubman, CBS reported.
“The reported decision by the Trump Administration to change the names of the USNS Harvey Milk and other ships … is a shameful, vindictive erasure of those who fought to break down barriers for all to chase the American Dream,” said House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi in a Tuesday statement which asked Hegseth and the Navy to reconsider its decision.
“Our military is the most powerful in the world – but this spiteful move does not strengthen our national security or the ‘warrior’ ethos,” Pelosi’s statement continued. “Instead, it is a surrender of a fundamental American value: to honor the legacy of those who worked to build a better country.”
In a statement, the progressive military veterans group VoteVets called Hegseth’s decision “a calculated act of disrespect” to Milk’s legacy, his service, and “every American who has ever worn the uniform.”
“Like so many LGBTQ+ service members of his generation, [Milk] faced discrimination from the very institutions he served with loyalty and courage,” the group wrote. “To erase his name now — during Pride Month — is no innocent bureaucratic decision.. It’s part of Hegseth’s broader campaign to purge the military of anyone who doesn’t fit his narrow, outdated vision.”
The group also accused Hegseth of using his decision to distract from harms being inflicted on military members and their families by Republicans who back Hegseth and the recent firing of 80,000 workers from the Department of Veterans Affairs, as well as GOP efforts to restrict or end Medicaid access for over 14 million Americans nationwide.
NEW: VoteVets slams decision to strip Harvey Milk’s name from Navy ship.“This isn’t just offensive—it’s a calculated act of disrespect.”It's not about tradition. It’s about forcing out those who don’t fit Hegseth’s 1980s action figure fantasy of service.FULL STATEMENT
Last Pride Month, Hegseth said he thought that the 2011 repeal of the military’s ban on out lesbian, gay, and bisexual members was part of the “Marxist” and “leftist” “gateway” shift towards individualism (rather than unit cohesion) that was “a costume for the trans agenda being pushed into the military,” something that undermined the military’s overall effectiveness.
In 2015, Hegseth said that the military repealed its anti-gay ban under former President Obama because “it was more interested in social engineering led by this president than they are in war fighting.” He said that the inclusion of out LGBTQ+ soldiers helped “erode” the U.S military’s effectiveness.
Before becoming defense secretary, Hegseth was accused by his own mother of abusing women and by previous coworkers of drinking on the job and sexually pursuing female colleagues. He had also been previously accused of paying off a woman who accused him of raping her while they attended a Republican conference in 2017.
Hegseth is currently overseeing the implementation of the president’s executive order banning transgender people from the military. That executive order said that trans people can’t lead “an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle” and that not using pronouns associated with a person’s sex
assigned at birth violates the military’s “high standards for troop readiness, lethality, cohesion, honesty, humility, uniformity, and integrity.”
A federal judge pointed out that trans military members have legally been able to serve for years without any serious issues. The judge said the order provided no compelling logic for banning trans soldiers apart from bias-motivated discrimination that needlessly insulted trans soldiers’ service.
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