Milk’s naval service was utterly unremarkable.
“In the Navy, every month is Pride Month” is what a Marine company might observe should they one day evolve the capacity for wit.
They wouldn’t be entirely wrong, either.
When I was in, homosexuality aboard, or heterosexuality, for that matter, was treated by the brass with the same censure — namely, it is, was, and should ever be out of regs to gavel in sexual congress in the passageways, engine rooms, or fan rooms. This becomes all the more true when the individuals involved are a senior enlisted and a junior sailor or an officer and an enlisted shmuck.
That said, there are the regs and then there is reality, and the Navy is famously the most libertine of the branches because of the extremes in liberty, from the interminable months in wave-crushing tin cans to the sudden release into whatever port is unfortunate enough to find it hosting gangs of lusty sailors — the men and their officers have a well-earned reputation for feats of debauchery. So long as all hands are back at their stations without any embarrassing headlines by the time colors shift, the brass is willing to look the other way.
This brings us to Harvey Milk, the so-called gay rights hero and martyr who in 2016 was posthumously honored with an oiler named after him: the USNS Harvey Milk (T-AO 206).
Two days ago, our John Fund gave the strongest defense to date of why the ship should retain Milk’s name, noting that Milk, at least for some of his life, was anti-statist and anti-communist and volunteered for the Navy during the Korean War, taking a commission and serving as a diving officer aboard a sub-rescue ship (USS Kittiwake).
The Nation’s John Nichols focuses on the perceived vindictiveness of the renaming effort by the Trump administration, what with the memo arriving in what some call Pride Month (a celebration of alternative lifestyles and sexual exhibitionism).
My initial reaction to the naming of the Milk nine years ago, still wearing the crackerjacks myself, was that the Navy and the powers that be (the Obama administration) should at least make sailors work for a euphemistic moniker for the newest ships. Now, only slightly more mature and learning of the renaming, I still cannot summon any sympathy for the man or anyone who has any attachment to the name.
It is at this point that we should separate the various arguments for Milk’s honors, both initial and retroactive. And it is worthwhile to note that this ship is one of several support ships, the Lewis-class, that were intended to bear the names of various activists, from labor types Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez, to Harriet Tubman and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. While I’ll get to why Milk’s naval service doesn’t merit a rowboat, let alone a supply ship, take note that his classmates were not honored for their fidelity to the U.S. military, not even tangentially.
One, politicians have no place on a warship or the ships that tend to them. This is a view I’ve held irrespective of partisan lean — e.g., the new Ford-class has no business following the presidential name convention of many of the Nimitz-class carriers, with the George Bush and William Clinton now awaiting their time in Newport News. The Ticonderoga-class cruisers and their little brothers in the Oliver Hazard Perry–class frigates had the right of it: Navy vessels should be self-referentially militant, with names that honor great American battles or Medal of Honor–bearing war heroes. If we should be forced to turn parts of Creation to ash, let that firepower originate aboard an Antietam or the Bennie G. Adkins, not the “Dubya.” Eight years in office, any office, simply aren’t worthy of a ship that’ll last 50 years in tempests and along hostile shores. If that is true of those who hold the highest of the land, it’s that much more true when it comes to a local politician and organizer with a penchant for young men.
Two, Milk’s naval service was utterly unremarkable. He served his four years, received all of the participation ribbons and medals one expects, and then left the service (there is some dispute about whether he was forced out with an other-than-honorable discharge for his overt homosexuality or received an honorable discharge and was sent on his way). Whatever the case, the U.S. would need another 20 million or so ships to name if a Good Conduct medal and four years of service were the requirements for naming honors.
Three, it is not a conservative’s job to preserve the equivalent of political graffiti. The left has 13 names and faces that it tags on anything and everything it can dibs or prize the nameplate from. The Navy appreciates redundancy like none other, but the insistence that anything other than one of their chosen pantheon of progressive deities is an insult goes too far. The Navy deserves ships that celebrate its accomplishments, our accomplishments as a seafaring nation that has brought prosperity and relative security to vast swaths of the globe. To highlight the absurdity on even the most sympathetic example: Harriet Tubman was an amazing woman, but she never learned how to swim. Square pegs and round holes.
To honor Milk, who at age 33 was in a relationship with a 17-year-old male, who was too open for even the Navy to look past while accomplishing nothing that would elevate him beyond any other sailor and officer who did his duty during that time, with a ship for his naval and political contributions is like giving King David a commendation for his strategy during the siege of Rabbah.
The Navy can do better, and Congress should stipulate that all future ships be named for men, women, and events that promote the seagoing service rather than the pet passions of the type of activists least likely to serve our nation.