At the beginning of Pride Month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that the USNS Harvey Milk would be renamed, stating that it would be the first U.S. Navy ship named for a civil rights leader to receive a new name. The administrations position this past month has been that no ships should be named after civil rights leaders because thats ideologically motivated and that the renaming was not about Milk in particular.A Navy spokesperson even called naming a U.S. Navy ship for Milk abhorrent but stressed that this abhorrence was just about how the ships name was an ideologically-motivated action. The administration said that it would be renaming all ships named for civil rights leaders, including those that were named for suffragist Lucy Stone, abolitionist Sojourner Truth, racial justice champion John Lewis, Latina labor activist Dolores Huerta, Latino civil rights organizer Cesar Chavez, and civil rights activist Medgar Evers. Related The remarkable gay-straight political coalition created by Harvey Milk & George Moscone It was an unlikely partnership. Last month, out Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) asked Hegseth about the renaming in a Senate hearing, and Hegseth responded that the Defense Department is not interested in naming ships after activists. Insights for the LGBTQ+ community Subscribe to our briefing for insights into how politics impacts the LGBTQ+ community and more. Subscribe to our Newsletter today Late last week, Hegseth announced that the USNS Harvey Milk would now be called the USNS Oscar V. Peterson, who was straight. I am pleased to announce that the United States Navy is renaming the USNS Harvey Milk to the USNS Oscar V. Peterson,Hegseth wrote on X. We are taking the politics out of ship naming.But Defense officials told Task & Purpose an online publication that covers the U.S. military that there are no plans to rename any of the other ships that were mentioned, even though many of those ships were named after civil rights leaders who had no record of military service. Milk served as a diving officer on a submarine rescue ship during the Korean War. Thereare currently no plans to rename other ships in this class, one unnamed official said. Oscar V. Peterson was a chief petty officer in the U.S. Navy who was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions during the Battle of the Coral Sea during World War II. Peterson was a white man who was married to a woman and did not identify publicly as LGBTQ+.Milk, who served in the Korean War, was forced out of the military with a less-than-honorable discharge, facing court-martial because he was gay. He left with the rank of lieutenant junior grade. Milk became one of the first out gay people elected to public office when he was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977. Earlier that decade, he helped lead the fight against the Briggs Initiative, which would have banned gay people from working in public schools in California. He is also known for his Hope Speech, where he implored a crowd during Pride in 1978 to come out to everyone they knew to fight the conspiracy of silence. He was assassinated by former supervisor Dan White in late 1978. President Barack Obama honored Milk with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009.Like so many LGBTQ+ service members of his generation, [Milk] faced discrimination from the very institutions he served with loyalty and courage, the group VoteVets said in a statement last month. To erase his name now during Pride Month is no innocent bureaucratic decision. Its part of Hegseths broader campaign to purge the military of anyone who doesnt fit his narrow, outdated vision.Subscribe to theLGBTQ Nation newsletterand be the first to know about the latest headlines shaping LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.