USS Harvey Milk
We told you more than four years ago that Ray Mabus had run out of names of heroic former Navy/Marine Corps folks for ships’ names and he was considering naming one after gay rights icon Harvey Milk. Well, USNI News reports that day is here;
The July 14, 2016 notification, signed by Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus, indicated he intended to name a planned Military Sealift Command fleet oiler USNS Harvey Milk (T-AO-206). The ship would be the second of the John Lewis-class oilers being built by General Dynamics NASSCO in San Diego, Calif.
The Secretary of the Navy’s office is deferring releasing additional information until the naming announcement, a Navy official told USNI News on Thursday.
Mabus has said the John Lewis-class – named after civil rights activist and congressman Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) – would be named after civil rights leaders.
Naming a ship after Milk, “will further send a green light to all the brave men and women who serve our nation that honesty, acceptance and authenticity are held up among the highest ideals of our military,” said Milk’s nephew Stuart Milk in a statement to San Diego LGBT Weekly in 2012.
Category: Navy
This story attracted a lot of posts.
Not sure what the big deal is.
It not the first ship to be named after a gay man.
What are you, stupider than usual, Poodle?
Harvey Milk was a self-promoting asshole who had little to nothing to do with civil rights. There are historical figures such as Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and Susan B. Anthony who had a hell of a lot more to do with civil rights than that fucking asshole.
What part of that is so hard for you to understand? Either start reading for comprehension or go crawl back under your rock.
Harvey Milk was a pedophile that was gunned down in workplace violence. What is it he did for civil rights again?
The point here, dipshit, is that Milk never did anything in or out of the Navy worthy of getting a ship named after him. That he was into dudes is immaterial. That he was forgettable as a junior Navy officer and shamelessly self-serving as a municipal politician is the what’s relevant, as is the fact that he was remanufactured postmortem from whole cloth as some kind of “civil rights martyr” when he just had the bad luck of getting between the mayor and a pissed-off councilman whose marksmanship sucked. It seems that his assailant did indeed have a beef with Milk (very much secondary to the one with the mayor), but it was rooted solely in Milk having previously screwed the guy over.
This has been explained in great detail multiple times already. Just how much Barney-style explanation do you need? UC-educated my ass!