Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced on Friday the USNS Harvey Milk is being renamed the USNS Oscar V. Peterson, after he ordered the Navy to strike the name of the pioneering gay rights activist from the ship.
Hegseth made the announcement in a video posted to X.
“We are taking the politics out of ship naming,” Hegseth said. “We’re not renaming the ship to anything political. This is not about political activists, unlike the previous administration. Instead, we’re renaming the ship after a United States Navy Congressional Medal of Honor recipient, as it should be.”
Peterson, Hegseth said, was a chief watertender who was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for heroism during an attack on the USS Neosho by Japanese bombers during the Battle of Coral Sea in World War II.
According to the Navy, Peterson kept the ship operational and was credited with saving the lives of 123 of his shipmates before succumbing to his injuries.
Milk was also a Navy veteran, serving nearly four years in the service. He was discharged at the rank of a junior lieutenant after being threatened with a court martial because of his sexual orientation.
Milk was one of the first openly gay men elected to public office in the United States after winning a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977. He was assassinated a year later.
Hegseth ordered the Navy to rename the ship during Pride Month, which celebrates the LGBTQ community.
Stuart Milk, the nephew of Harvey Milk and the founder of the Harvey Milk Foundation, told ABC News that his uncle “would say this is a call to action” and that sailors he met on the USNS Harvey Milk were “very proud to serve” on the ship.
He called Hegseth’s premise for the renaming of the oiler — that “people want to be proud of the ship they’re sailing in” — as “antithetical to the truth.”
“We sometimes go two steps forward and one step back,” Stuart Milk said. “This is a pretty big step back.”
But “the fact of the matter is my uncle’s legacy will live well past the 40 years’ life of a military ship, but it’s also endured quite a bit,” he added.
Lindsay Church, the executive director of the advocacy group Minority Veterans of America, told ABC News that Hegseth is “America’s culture warrior, and is bringing that particular lens into leading the Department of Defense, rather than focusing on military readiness and what will actually make Americans safer.”
“We put that uniform on, we are Americans. When we take the uniform off and continue to serve our country, we are Americans,” Church said.
There are currently no plans to rename other ships in this class, according to Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson.
The USNS Harvey Milk is part of a fleet of replenishment oilers named after civil rights advocates including Chief Justice Earl Warren and US Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.
While Hegseth said he wants to take the politics out of ship naming, the effort is an inherently political endeavor.
Traditionally, the Navy Secretary — a political appointee confirmed by Congress — is in charge of naming ships at the direction of the president.
Of the Navy’s 15 most recently named aircraft carriers, 10 have been named for past U.S. presidents and two for members of Congress, according to the Congressional Research Service.
In the past, Hegseth criticized efforts by the Biden administration to change the name of military bases that honored Confederate generals.
In the case of Fort Bragg in North Carolina, which was named more than a century ago after a Confederate general who lost battles in the Civil War, Hegseth argued that “legacy matters” and it breaks a “generational link” for people who serve there.
Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said renaming the USNS Harvey Milk is different.
“In no way is the Fort Bragg renaming comparable to a potential renaming of the USNS Harvey Milk — which occurred very recently in 2016 under the Obama Administration and was widely viewed as an ideologically-motivated action that countless sailors and veterans found abhorrent,” Parnell said in a statement.
ABC News’ Alexandra Hutzler contributed to this report.
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