Navy Admiral On Pete Hegseth Renaming Harvey Milk Ship: 'I Don't Agree With It'
WASHINGTON – Retired Navy Adm. James Stavridis said Friday that he disagrees with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordering the Navy to take the rare step of renaming the USNS Harvey Milk because Milk was gay.
“I am scratching my head about renaming the USS USNS … Harvey Milk,” Stavridis said on SiriusXM’s “The Michael Smerconish Program.”
“Because Harvey Milk was gay, we all know that. But today, gay sailors serve openly and with a great deal of pride in the U.S. military. I know many who are gay and are very competent, war-fighting sailors,” Stavridis said. “So when [the] secretary of defense says, ‘Hey, I’m renaming this in order to restore the warrior ethos,’ I just don’t get that at all.”
Milk, who was a San Francisco politician in the 1970s and the first openly gay man elected to public office in California, served in the Navy for four years during the Korean War. He was forced to resign in 1955 rather than face a court-martial for being gay. A trailblazer in the LGBTQ+ community, Milk was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012 and honored with a Navy ship named after him in 2016.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/navy-admiral-pete-hegseth-renaming-174344391.html