USNS Harvey Milk Navy renamed after WWII naval officer Oscar V. Peterson : NPR
The USNS Harvey Milk leaves the naval project of dynamics general dynamics after a baptism ceremony in San Diego, on November 6, 2021. The ship was renamed USNS Oscar V. Peterson, after the Secretary for the Defense of the Second World War, Pete Hegseth, announced on Friday.
Ariana Drehsler / AFP via Getty Images
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Ariana Drehsler / AFP via Getty Images
The Pentagon has officially stripped the late name of gay civil rights Harvey Milk of an American naval ship, among the wider efforts of the Trump administration to erase what it describes as an “awakened” ideology of the public.
Former Usns Harvey Milk is now called the USNS Oscar V. Peterson, defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, announced in a video published Friday online.
“We are removing the policy of the denomination of ships,” said Hegseth. “We are not rejoining the ship to nothing political. These are not political activists, unlike the previous administration.”
The ship is one of the John Lewis class oilers, named after the famous civil rights activist and a longtime member of the congress.
In 2016, the secretary of the time of the Mavy Ray Mabus said that the ships of this class will be appointed according to the leaders of civil rights activism. This included paying tribute to Milk, who was a navy veteran and became the first openly gay person to serve in Californian politics when he was elected to the San Francisco supervisors.
Milk was assassinated by a former colleague from the Board of Directors in 1978, leaving behind an inheritance of advocacy for the rights of homosexuals.
The new homonym of the ship, Oscar V. Peterson, was a naval officer who was killed during the Second World War and posthumously granted a medal of honor by the congress for bravery during the war.
“People want to be proud of the ship in which they sail,” HegSeth said in the video announcement. “And so we name him after a chef, a chief of the navy.”
Under the direction of Hegseth, the navy reviews the names of several other ships named according to women, blacks and Hispanics.
The other navy ships in review include those named after Thurgood Marshall, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Harriet Tubman, Dolores Huerta, Cesar Chavez, Lucy Stone and Medgar Evers.
