Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered the Navy to rename an oil ship named after gay rights activist Harvey Milk, a move that pointedly comes at the start of Pride Month.
Military.com first reported the impending name change, citing a memorandum from the Office of the Secretary of the Navy. The document reportedly showed that the service planned to strip the oiler USNS Harvey Milk of its moniker
A defense official also confirmed to the outlet that Hegseth had ordered Navy Secretary John Phelan to undertake the renaming, with the announcement intentionally set to occur on June 13 during Pride.
Following news of the impending name change, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) called the decision “a shameful, vindictive erasure of those who fought to break down barriers for all to chase the American Dream.”
“Our military is the most powerful in the world – but this spiteful move does not strengthen our national security or the “warrior” ethos,” the former House Speaker said in a statement. “Instead, it is a surrender of a fundamental American value: to honor the legacy of those who worked to build a better country.”
Both the Pentagon and Navy did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Hill.
USNS Harvey Milk was officially named at an August 2016 ceremony in San Francisco, where Milk, an American politician, became the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California in 1977 as a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. He was assassinated in 1978 while serving on the board and posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009.
Milk, a former Navy lieutenant who served during the Korean War aboard a submarine rescue ship, was forced to resign from service after four years and accept an other than honorable discharge instead of facing a court-martial for being gay - at the time a crime within the military.
A John Lewis-class oiler - a group of ships specifically to be named after prominent civil rights leaders and activists - Harvey Milk has officially been in service since November 2021 when she was christened and launched.
“The secretary of the Navy needed to be here today, not just to amend the wrongs of the past, but to give inspiration to all of our LGBTQ community leaders who served in the Navy, in uniform today and in the civilian workforce as well too, and to tell them that we’re committed to them in the future,” then-Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro said at the ceremony.
“For far too long, sailors like Lt. Milk were forced into the shadows or, worse yet, forced out of our beloved Navy,” Del Toro added. “That injustice is part of our Navy history, but so is the perseverance of all who continue to serve in the face of injustice.”
But Hegseth since becoming Pentagon chief has set out to dismantle any military program or reading material dealing with or referencing diversity, anti-racism or gender issues.
That effort, which he has argued is meant to return the armed forces to a “warrior ethos,” also included attempts to remove anything deemed as diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) content from Defense Department websites and social media pages.
That resulted in the temporary removal of webpages dedicated to baseball legend Jackie Robinson, former Defense Secretary Colin Powell, the Navajo Code Talkers and Japanese Americans.
Hegseth’s undertaking has now apparently extended to changing the names of ships. The Navy memo notes that stripping Harvey Milk of its name was being done for “alignment with president and SECDEF objectives and SECNAV priorities of reestablishing the warrior culture,” referencing President Trump, Hegseth and Phelan.
The memo did not include the new name for the ship, but states that Hegseth and Phelan are set to announce the moniker aboard the USS Constitution, the Navy’s oldest commissioned vessel, according to Military.com.
It’s rare that the Navy will rename a ship, with the last such instance in 2023 when the service - on recommendation from a Congressionally mandated commission set up to scrutinize Confederate-tied names across the entire military - decided to change the cruiser USS Chancellorsville to USS Robert Smalls, and the research ship USNS Maury to USNS Marie Tharp.
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