That name is sure to strike terror in the hearts of our enemies.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth today ordered the Navy to review the names of its vessels honoring prominent civil rights leaders and other figures of note not exactly identified with the armed services or its mission. The ships include those named for Harvey Milk (above), one of the country’s first openly gay elected officials and a Navy veteran who was assassinated; Thurgood Marshall, the first Black Supreme Court Justice; Ruth Bader Ginsburg; Harriet Tubman, the heroine of the Underground Railroad; Lucy Stone, an abolitionist and suffragist; Medgar Evers, the assassinated civil-rights leader; labor leader and activist Cesar Chavez, a labor leader; and Dolores Huerta, another labor leader.
Hegseth’s decision, reported by Military.com, is being interpreted by critics as an intentional slap at Pride Month, which is in June. “Secretary Hegseth is committed to ensuring that the names attached to all DOD installations and assets are reflective of the commander in chief’s priorities, our nation’s history, and the warrior ethos,” the Pentagon said in a statement today, adding that potential ship renaming “will be announced after internal reviews are complete.”
Your Ethics Alarms Pride Month Ethics Quiz of the Day:
Is this order responsible, fair, respectful and ethically justifiable?
I am, as the schizophrenic memorably said, of two minds on this issue. On one side, it seems like a petty and needlessly provocative move. As we have discussed here before, removing an honor is very different from not extending one. I think naming ships after figures whose careers and fame have nothing to do with war and the military is dumb, but removing those honors once they have been bestowed feels like a gratuitous rebuke. These were all good people. Their names just don’t belong on naval vessels.
The counter argument is that irresponsible, virtue-signaling, woke garbage should not stand just because it is inconvenient to fix it, or because it will make some groups angry. What’s next after the USNS Harvey Milk? The Ru Paul? Is the next step after the USNS Harriet Tubman a ship named after Angela Davis?
Ethics Alarms 
My gut feeling is that we should have a presumptive rule that once a honor is bestowed it should not be taken away. So Fort Bragg should not have been renamed Fort Liberty, and this also implies that we should not topple statues of important historical figures due to a reevaluation of past ethics. In that case we can make a case of restoring the honor by giving a fort (or ship or mountain) its earlier name. This also, and sends a message that this administration will not stand by cancel culture.
I think the SecDef is going on the wrong path by renaming the Harvey Milk and other ships. This looks like the start of a mindless tit for tat, and a next administration will happily rename the ships back to Harvey Milk et al, and escalate the “poke a finger in your eye” naming policies.
The argument that conservative perspective should not engage in name changing because it can result in tit for tat is what allows the left to advance their perspective. The left counts on it because it means that whatever they do will continue after they are not in power.
I don’t consider it wise to name things after historical figures unless there is some relevance to the thing. Build a monument to their work if you want to honor them. A ship’s or a military installation name should reflect its history not some unrelated person. We don’t name legislation after unrelated persons so why do it with anything else.
Further, announced decisions should not have to wait because it is some group’s month. Every name listed above could be tied to some group who will take umbrage because it affects one of their own.
The solution is to undo the wrong name changes, not make new wrong name changes.
The only caveat I would have for that is that there is a long tradition of naming ships after Presidents, whether or not they served in the military.
Another exception would be locations. There was a navy submarine named the USS Minneapolis-St. Paul. Notwithstanding the amount of water we have, I doubt that a nuclear submarine would navigate the Mississippi River very well around Sty. Anthony Falls. Nonetheless, such a name seems appropriate or, at least, unobjectionable as an innocuous honor.
-Jut
The only caveat I would have for that is that there is a long tradition of naming ships after Presidents, whether or not they served in the military.
But they were all Commanders in Chief.
Most of the names that Jack listed were of people who fought against injustice. I assumed the ships were named to inspire the crew to their ideals.
I have this nice bridge you might like to buy…
I’m on record here* saying that the names of places and things, once named, should be left alone. I stand by that here.
What would be more appropriate is to announce a policy that all names of military assets after some specified date will be done according to whatever new criteria they choose, and then abide by it.
This also combats the “some future administration will just change the names back” problem because it puts the hypothetical future administration in the position of having the strike down a perfectly logical and reasonable policy and in doing so having to justify why it’s necessary.
–Dwayne
* Ordinarily, I’d link to the article(s), but for some reason the search engines (and possibly my memory of good search terms to use) are failing me. So . . . I guess just please trust that I once wrote a rant about the Sears Tower being renamed the Willis Tower along with a few other examples, and why I didn’t like it.
Sailors consider renaming ships to be bad luck. They’re pretty strong in that conviction.
The Russian warship Muskva was launched as the Slava, but they wanted to sever the connection to its origin in Ukraine. After it sank, this only reinforced that superstition. The US navy should stay away from renaming for that reason alone.
Of course it was divider-in-chief, Obama, who veered significantly from the (somewhat loose) conventions for naming and started using “social justice” figures favored mainly by the left. Most had little to no connections to the military (and Milk was a suspected pedophile who was involved with a 16 yr old, but claimed their relationship didn’t get serious” until the boy was 18). This opens the door for every succeeding administration to put a thumb in the eye of their opponents. Would the left be happy if Trump had a ship named the Wayne LaPierre? Hey, the military use guns, right? …And we do have a ship named after the Constitution, Second Amendment and all, you know.
These Obama-naming schemes should be reversed and nipped in the bud. Maybe establish set naming conventions and require congressional approval of names.
Somewhat relevant side note: In WWII, the US Navy and other allies used British and Canadian built “flower class” corvettes as destroyer escorts, mainly r. Perhaps imagining that sailors might not be too fond of having to admit they served on the “Daisy” or the “Pansy”, the US renamed them with monikers like “Fury”.
Less relevant aside-side note: One of these corvettes still exists, and is on display in Halifax. My father was barely old enough to get into the last year of the war, and served on the USS Fury (not the one on display). It might have been OK without a name change, as it previously was “Larkspur”…not as dainty-sounding as many of the others.
Obviously the next boat will be the USS Boaty McBoatface