Tattooed SECDEF Pines for a Warrior Culture

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

In a stunning display of macho absurdity on an adolescent level,  former Fox News talker and current Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, announced this week that  he had ordered the Secretary of the Navy, John Phelan, to rename the USNS Harvey Milk.   The Harvey Milk is a "replenishment oiler," a ship which refuels other ships at sea.  It was christened for sea duty in 2016 in honor of gay civil rights activist and San Francisco City Commissioner Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in the United States.   The USNS Harvey Milk is part of the "John Lewis" class of replenishment oilers that are bing named for civil rights icons.

Hegseth made the announcement at the start of Gay Pride month.   He said the military would be stripping the USNS Harvey Milk of its name, and issued a memo saying that the renaming was bieng done so that there is "alignment with President and SECDEF (Secretary of Defense) objectives and SECNAV (Secretary o the Navy) priorities of reestablishing the warrior culture."  

Obviously, if that is their reasoning, then the President, Secretary of Defense, and Secretary of the Navy all maintain a belief that a gay man cannot represent the warrior culture.  Harvey Milk was a member of the US Navy during the Korean War, and a diving officer who served aboard a submarine.  Donald Trump had bone spurs and neglected five invitations to serve in the Vietnam War - but who's the warrior?.

It was also revealed this week that the names of three new John Lewis replenishment oilers which have yet to be brought on-line are also in danger of having their prospective names changed.  Those ships were to be named after Supreme Court Justices Thurgood Marshall (the first black person to serve on the high court) and Ruth Bader Ginsberg (a justice with a liberal perspective who served on the court for nearly thirty years) - as well as former slave and abolitionist Harriet Tubman.

(During Donald Trump's first term in office he was instrumental in stopping the US Treasury from replacing Andrew Jackson's likeness on the twenty-dollar bill with that of Harriet Tubman.)

If a lot of these name-changes sound as though they may be the result of homophobia, racism, and misogyny, others no doubt see it differently.  Many of them view it as a social realignment where white men are simply retaking their 'rightful" place at the head of the line.

But that, too, will change.  Count on it.