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Hegseth to strip Milk’s name from
Navy vessel
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Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has ordered the U.S. Navy to rename the ship named for the late San Francisco supervisor and gay rights icon Harvey Milk. The decision, coming during Pride Month, set off waves of criticism from LGBTQ officials and community leaders.
Military.com first reported the news June 3.
The outlet reported that the planned timing of the announcement June 13, just after World Pride wraps in the District of Columbia, is intentional, and that the move is being made to create “alignment with president [Donald Trump] and [Hegseth] objectives and [Navy Secretary John Phelan] priorities of reestablishing the warrior culture.”
A number of naval ships in the John Lewis class of ships were named for civil rights heroes such as Milk, who himself was a Navy veteran. As the Bay Area Reporter noted in February 2020, Milk was given an "other than honorable" discharge from the U.S. Navy and forced to resign on February 7, 1955 rather than face a court-martial because of his homosexuality, according to a trove of naval records obtained by the paper.
Lewis, the late Democratic congressmember from Georgia, participated in the Nashville sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, and the March on Washington during the Civil Rights movement for Black Americans.
The Navy renaming ships is rare. Congressmember Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) stated that the Navy is renaming other ships named for civil rights heroes. The others' namesakes are U.S. attorney general Robert F. Kennedy...
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