The leaders of California denounced reports on Tuesday that the Trump government is preparing to get rid of the name of the killed gay rights leader Harvey Milk in honor of his estate and to call it a blow to the LGBTQ+ community, just as Pride Month starts.
Milk was chosen as San Francisco Supervisor in the 1970s and became one of the first elected officials in the country. After being killed in the town hall of San Francisco in 1978, he became an icon of the movement for gay rights, in which images of his face became synonymous with the struggle for gay rights.
Milk had served with the navy before he became an activist and political figure, and LGBTQ+ lawyers and members of the service fought for years to formally recognize his estate by the navy.
The outlet Military.com reported for the first time On Tuesday afternoon, Minister of Defense Pete Hegseeth had ordered the Navy to rename the USNS Harvey Milk, an oil built in San Diego as part of a series of ships named after leaders of civil rights. It was launched in 2021.
The Pentagon would not confirm or deny that the ship would be renamed.
In a statement to the Times, Chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell Hegseeth said [Department of Defense] Installations and assets reflect the priorities of the supreme commander, the history of our nation and the Warrior-Ethos “, and that” every possible refurbishment (s) will be announced after internal assessments have been completed. “
The Pentagon would not say whether such a review had been launched for the USNS Harvey Milk. The navy referred to the Pentagon.
The removal of the name of Milk would be in accordance with a broader push of Hegseeth and other leaders in the Trump government to remove formal recognitions of queer rights and other programs or messages that promote diversity, fairness and inclusion in the federal government.
Leaders in California – where milk is often praised as a hero – were quickly the idea to denounce his name from the ship.
Gavin Newsom government wrote on the social media platform X that Trump’s’Assault On Veterans has become a new layer. “
San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk speaks to reporters in October 1978, weeks before he was murdered.
(James Palmer / Associated Press)
Trump and Hegseeth have also issued a radical ban on transgender people who serve in the army.
“Harvey Milk was not only an icon for civil rights – he was a Korean warfighting veteran whose commander called him” excellent, “Newsom said. “Defeating his name of a naval ship will not erase his legacy as an American icon, but it reveals Trump’s contempt for the values that our veterans fight to protect.”
Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-SAN Francisco) Repeated Newsom With her own remark on X.
“Our army is the most powerful in the world – but this hateful move does not strengthen our national security or the ‘warriors’,” she wrote. “It is a shameful, vengeful erasing of those who fought to break down barriers to everyone to chase the American dream.”
Is Senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), who is gay and once represented the same district as milk in the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, said in an interview with the Times that the move was all “part of Trump’s systematic campaign to eliminate LGBTQ people from public life.”
“They want us to leave, go back into the closet, not being part of public life,” said Wiener. “And we don’t go anywhere.”
After graduating from the university, Milk reported in the Navy in 1951 and was stationed in San Diego. According to the Harvey Milk Foundationhe resigned from the rank of lieutenant junior degree in 1955 “after being officially questioned about his sexual orientation.”
He moved to San Francisco in 1972, opened a camera shop in Castro Street and quickly came to collect the growing local gay community in politics to fight for rights and strategic alliances with other groups, including organized work and the great Asian and Pacific Island community of the city.
Milk was elected to the Council of Supervisors in 1977 and helped to manage efforts to beat a voice initiative from 1978 that gay and lesbian people would have excluded teaching in public schools in the entire state – an important political victory for the LGBTQ+ community.
In the same year, milk was murdered alongside mayor George Moscone in the town hall by former supervisor than White. His murder confirmed his status as an icon of the gay rights movement.
Wiener called milk ‘an absolute hero’ who ‘died for our community’ and deserves the honor of being named a naval ship after him.
“A group of LGBTQ veterans worked for years to achieve this goal to call a ship for Harvey, and to have it removed so casually, exactly during the Pride Month, is heartbreaking and painful,” said Wiener.
Removing his name would mean more than scrubbing a stenciling from the side of a ship, Wiener said: “Especially now with the attacks on our community, and so many young LGBTQ people [seeing] So much negativity for our community. ‘
Milk was a “very visible role model for young queer people, and he gave people hope in a way that had never happened before of a controversial queer leader, and he was murdered because of his visibility and leadership for our community,” said Wiener, and for young queer people “to see the name of a gay sex of a gay sex
US officials announced for the first time in 2016 that a ship would be named after milk, as well as abolitionist Sojourner Truth, supreme judge of the Earl Warren Supreme Court, Atty. Gene. Robert F. Kennedy, suffragist Lucy Stone and Rep. John Lewis.
During an event that marks the start of the construction of the ship in 2019, Milk’s cousin Stuart Milk said that the naming of the ship after his uncle “sends a global message of inclusion” that not only said that the US will “tolerate everyone”, but that “we celebrate everyone”.
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