President Donald Trump’s assault on the LGBTQ+ community will continue through Pride month.
According to a Tuesday report from Military.com, the U.S. Navy is preparing to rename the USNS Harvey Milk, a Navy support ship christened in honor of the assassinated gay rights icon. The report was confirmed by CBS News and ABC News. The order reportedly came directly from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Other vessels named after prominent civil rights and labor leaders are on a list for recommended renaming. According to a list obtained by CBS News, these include the USNS Thurgood Marshall, named after the first Black Supreme Court justice; the USNS Ruth Bader Ginsburg, named after the second woman to serve on the Supreme Court; the USNS Harriet Tubman, named after the famed abolitionist and former slave; the USNS Dolores Huerta, named after the Chicana labor activist; the USNS Lucy Stone, named after the suffragist and abolitionist; the USNS Cesar Chavez, named after the labor activist who worked alongside Huerta; and the USNS Medgar Evers, named after the civil rights leader and anti-segregationist who was assassinated by a white supremacist in 1963.
It’s no coincidence that such prominent historic leaders in minority movements are being targeted by an administration that is hell-bent on erasing the history of American equality movements from the public consciousness. The Defense Department source who spoke with Military.com said the decision to rename the ship during Pride month was an intentional choice.
In January, Hegseth issued a directive titled, “Identity Months Dead at DoD,” in which he declared that members of the department were barred from using Pentagon resources to promote or celebrate “cultural awareness months,” including “National African American/Black History Month, Women’s History Month, Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, Pride Month, National Hispanic Heritage Month, National Disability Employment Awareness Month, and National American Indian Heritage Month.”
According to a memo obtained by CBS News, the decision to rename the ship was part of an effort to reestablish “the warrior culture” within the military — a particular fixation of Hegseth. But the names on the list are, in many ways, the embodiment of American “warrior culture.” Tubman braved the risk of capture and death to liberate dozens of slaves from the South, and Huerta and Chavez defied federal law to lead one of the most consequential labor strikes in American history. Evers led protests against segregation in the most racist corners of Mississippi. Milk was not only one of the most prominent figures in the gay rights movement in the ‘70s and ‘80s, he was also a Korean War veteran.
Milk was ousted from the Navy in 1955 after being accused of engaging in then-banned homosexual activities. He was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977 — the first gay man elected to the position — after years working as an activist and leader of the Castro neighborhood’s growing gay and lesbian community. As city supervisor, Milk worked closely with former Democratic California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, then also a city supervisor. Milk was assassinated along with former San Francisco Mayor George Moscone in 1978 by disgruntled former supervisor Dan White.
In 2019, when the Navy announced it would be naming a vessel after Milk, it seemed like a step towards restitution by the organization that had forced out Milk on the mere suspicion that he was gay, and had done the same to an estimated thousands of other service members under “don’t ask, don’t tell.”
“When Harvey Milk served in the military, he couldn’t tell anyone who he truly was,” California state Sen. Scott Wiener wrote in 2016. “Now our country is telling the men and women who serve, and the entire world, that we honor and support people for who they are. Harvey Milk’s strength continues to reverberate throughout our city, our country, and the world.”
Now, only a few years later, Republicans are using their revulsion of DEI as a cover to reinstitute discriminatory policies, and erase the work of countless Americans who have battled — and as in the case of Milk and others, lost their lives — in the ongoing work to build a better America for all. Under Trump, the military has banned the enlistment of transgender individuals, and the Pentagon recently caught flack for erasing scores of photos and web pages honoring women and minorities in the military — including in one instance flagging photos of the “Enola Gay” airplane which dropped a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, for deletion.
Now, civil rights heroes will have their names scrubbed from Navy vessels, lest any seaman learn too much about the men and women who fought for the rights they may now enjoy.
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