U.S. May Strip Harvey Milk’s Name From Navy Vessel
4th June 2025
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered the Navy to review the names of vessels honoring prominent civil rights leaders, including Harvey Milk, who was one of the country’s first openly gay elected officials and a Navy veteran.
News of Mr. Hegseth’s decision, reported earlier by Military.com, comes just days into Pride Month, which celebrates the contributions of luminaries in the L.G.B.T.Q. community.
Instead, Mr. Hegseth’s order was intended as a rebuke of Pride Month, keeping with the Trump administration’s drive to expunge diversity, equity and inclusion efforts across the federal government, according to a senior defense official familiar with the decision.
In principle I don’t have a problem with it. Harvy Milk’s only claim to fame is that he was the first homosexual politician in a significant office to own up to it; he never had any connection with the Navy or national defense, and the ship was named after him only to pander to the LBGTQRSTUVWXYZ+ crowd.
From a practical standpoint, I don’t like it. It sets a bad precedent when the government starts renaming ships after a change of administration. Where would it stop? It smacks of Stalin’s trick of erasing people from photographs. If a Republican administration starts doing this sort of thing, what’s to prevent a future Democrat administration from renaming the destroyer USS John McCain the USS Greta Thunberg? I don’t think that’s a road we want to start down.