Hegseth directs renaming of Navy ship honoring LGBT icon Harvey Milk
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Friday that a Navy vessel that recognizes gay rights icon Harvey Milk has been renamed, saying that ships should not be named for activists.
The vessel will be known as the USNS Oscar V. Peterson, recognizing a sailor who earned the Medal of Honor, the nation’s top award for valor in combat, in the Battle of the Coral Sea, a World War II clash in which U.S. and Australian forces fought the Japanese navy.
“People want to be proud of the ship they’re sailing in. And so, we’re naming it after a chief – a Navy chief,” Hegseth said in a video posted on social media. He noted that Peterson was an enlisted leader in the Navy.
The move was directed by Hegseth and carried out by Navy Secretary John Phelan. It marks the defense secretary’s latest foray into culture-war issues – even as he claims that such moves are designed to take politics out of the military. Since stepping into his post in January, he has sought to quash efforts celebrating diversity in the Defense Department and brought back the names of nine Army installations across the South that the Biden administration had renamed because of their recognition of Confederate military leaders who fought to preserve slavery.
“We are taking the politics out of ship naming. We’re not renaming the ship to anything political,” Hegseth said in the video released Friday. “This is not about political activists – unlike the previous administration.”
The effort was first reported during planning early in June. Along with the Trump administration’s previous targeting of diversity efforts, it raised questions about what other ships might be renamed. The USNS Harvey Milk was part of a class of oiler ship named after Rep. John Lewis, the late Georgia Democrat who organized with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights icons. Lewis’s name is on the initial ship in the class, with vessels in it recognizing Harriet Tubman, the abolitionist who led enslaved people to freedom on the Underground Railroad; Robert F. Kennedy, the former attorney general who was assassinated in 1968; and Thurgood Marshall, the first African American Supreme Court justice.
But the Pentagon said in a statement Friday that there are no plans to rename other Navy vessels following a review to “ensure all installations and assets are reflective of the Commander in Chief’s priorities, the Nation’s history and the warrior ethos.” A defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said any discussion of renaming other vessels was preliminary.
Hegseth’s previously reported intention to rename the USNS Harvey Milk prompted an outcry from gay rights groups as defense officials considered a ceremony during Pride Month. That did not occur, but Hegseth followed through on stripping Milk’s name from the ship before the end of the month.
Milk served in the Navy during the Korean War and was 48 when he was assassinated in San Francisco in 1978 after rising to prominence as an activist and politician who championed gay rights.
Honoring him has proved polarizing in recent years, particularly during an uproar in California in 2023 in which the president of the Temecula school board, Joseph Komrosky, called Milk a “pedophile” while arguing against a school curriculum that mentioned Milk. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) was among those who responded, calling Komrosky “ignorant.”
Navy Secretary Ray Mabus named the vessel after Milk in 2016, telling the Associated Press in an interview at the time that “you have to represent all the values that we hold as Americans.”
Stuart Milk, Harvey Milk’s nephew and the executive chair of the Harvey Milk Foundation, said in a statement earlier this month that the Milk family was “heartbroken” to hear about the Pentagon’s effort to rename the ship.
“His legacy has stood as a proud and bright light for the men and women who serve in our nation’s military – including those who have served on the USNS Harvey Milk – and a reminder that no barriers of race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion, or physical infirmity will restrain their human spirit,” Stuart Milk said. “Harvey Milk’s legacy is certainly enhanced and celebrated by a U.S. Naval Ship, however his legacy will not be silenced or diminished by the renaming of that Naval ship.”