Harvey Milk's Name is Ordered Erased from a Navy Ship and Dan Rather's Spot-On Response Goes Viral

The full-court press to erase the names, faces, and historical contributions of American servicemembers and other patriots who happen to have belonged to marginalized communities is ongoing. But the order to re-christen a Naval ship named for Harvey Milk – a directive deliberately issued to coincide with Pride Month – drew a tart response from Dan Rather.

Harvey Milk was a trailblazing pioneer in the fight for LGBTQ+ equality. A Navy veteran and business owner, and the first openly gay man in America to be elected to public office when he won a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Milk sought to give hope to his LGBTQ+ fellow citizens – especially queer youth. He was gunned down by an assassin in 1978, along with San Francisco Mayor George Moscone.

BuzzFeed recalled that Milk "served as an officer in the US Navy during the Korean War before being forced to leave the military because of suspicions about his sexual orientation," but that decades later, starting in 2016, his name graced a Naval vessel.

In a June 5 Facebook post, Rather, a retired network news anchor, noted that "The unintended consequence of scrubbing Harvey Milk's name from a Navy ship is now everyone's talking about him."

"Keep talking," Rather's post added.

"The comments are one of the rare areas online lately not full of garbage," BuzzFeed noted, reporting that the comments included messages like "They say they want to promote a 'warrior culture.' Milk was most definitely a warrior, as well as a decorated Navy veteran," and "Kind of a backhanded compliment! Now I know who he is and why the Navy honored him in the first place."

Another commentator suggested, "Could we then rename the Titanic the Hegseth?"

With the appointment of Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense, an onslaught of erasure targeting Black, female, LGBTQ+, and other minority servicemembers has ramped up under the guise of scrubbing "woke" influences from the military. Some of the deletions, such as the erasure of World War II contributions of Navajo code talkers and the brave service of women in uniform have prompted such an outcry that they have been walked back – at least for now.

Other attacks on troops who belong to marginalized groups are ongoing, such as involuntary separations of transgender people in uniform from the military.

The renaming of the USNS Harvey Milk hit headlines last week, with a Department of Defense official telling ABC News that the Pride Month timing of the move was "intentional." Other ships named for civil rights leaders that have been recommended for re-christening include "USNS Thurgood Marshall, USNS Ruth Bader Ginsburg, USNS Harriet Tubman, USNS Dolores Huerta, USNS Lucy Stone, USNS Cesar Chavez and USNS Medgar Evers," CBS News relayed.

A pattern emerges when scrutinizing the names of the ships targeted for re-christening: Thurgood Marshall was the first African-American Supreme Court Justice, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg the second woman – and first Jewish person – to serve on the bench of the Supreme Court. Lucy Stone and Harriet Tubman were abolitionists who worked to rescue enslaved people in America in the 1800s, and also worked to secure voting rights for women; Tubman herself was at one point a slave. Huerta and Chavez were labor leaders, and Evers, himself a military veteran, was an African American civil rights leader who was assassinated in his home in 1963 by a white supremacist.