Crying Over Spilt Milk

We graduated the Class of 2025 yesterday and don’t kick off the next academic year until summer faculty development kicks off July 17. With the end-of-year crunch over, I hope to get back into the swing of writing.

Steven Taylor has already addressed Tuesday’s announcement that the Secretary Defense has ordered the renaming of Navy oiler named after gay rights icon Harvey Milk and signaled that other vessels may face a similar fate. We mostly agree on the intent here and the problematic messages it sends.

It’s also true, though, that the original naming was motivated by domestic political signaling, so we shouldn’t be absolutely shocked by counter-signaling.

When naming a ship after Milk was first floated*, way back in April 2012, I was more than a little skeptical.

He’s already been given the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, posthumously. One can debate whether this was deserved.

It seems strange, though, to even contemplate naming a naval vessel after him. To be sure, he served honorably as a naval officer in the Korean War. But he’s not a war hero. Nor did he make admiral; he left as a lieutenant, junior grade. Nor was he Secretary of the Navy; his highest political office was San Francisco Board of Supervisors, where he served eleven months.

Still, as Thompson implies, Mabus started us down this track by naming ships after other liberal heroes. Surely, Milk is as deserving as Gabby Giffords. But that’s a rather low bar.

Subsequently, I just learned yesterday from a CRS report on the matter,

On January 6, 2016, then-Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus announced that the TAO-205 class ships will be named for “people who fought for civil rights and human rights,” and that the first ship in the class, TAO-205, which was procured in FY2016, was being be named for Representative John Lewis, making TAO-205 one of a small number of Navy ships that have been named for people who were living at the time that the naming announcement was made. TAO-205 class ships consequently are now known as John Lewis-class oilers.

The USNS John Lewis, alas, was launched a few months after the civil rights icon’s death. Lewis** never served in the Navy and, despite a long career in Congress, never served on the Armed Services Committee, the Foreign Affairs Committee, or otherwise had any apparent connection to the Navy. But he was, you know, John Freaking Lewis.

The Harvey Milk was the second ship of the Lewis class, launched in November 2021, followed by the Earl Warren (October 2022), Robert F. Kennedy (October 2023), Lucy Stone (September 2024), and Sojourner Truth (April 2025). The Thurgood Marshall, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Harriet Tubman, and Dolores Huerta have been named and are in various stages of completion.

Those aren’t the only examples. The last two ships of the Lewis and Clark-class dry cargo ship were named after Medgar Evers and Cesar Chavez. Both of these namings took place during the Obama administration. Previous ships had been named after explorers, astronauts, and various other pioneers.

These names were obviously politically motivated, designed to curry favor with affinity groups within the Democratic base. While one would hope the likes of Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and John Lewis would be unifying figures at this point, that’s certainly not the case with Earl Warren, Thurgood Marshall, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. There’s clearly some reverse “own the libs” going on with those namings.

Traditionally, of course, the response to this sort of thing is to grit one’s teeth and follow suit once one’s own turn comes about. Can the USNS Antonin Scalia, William F. Buckley, Jr., or Clarence Thomas be far from behind?

Now, Republicans will point to the mass effort to strip the names of those associated with the Confederacy from military bases and, indeed, Navy vessels that took place during the last administration. Steven covered this objection:

The libs wanted Robert E. Lee’s name off of things because he was the military commander of a rebellion against the United States and the US Constitution in service of setting up a new country built on the foundation that chattel slavery must be preserved.

The libs wanted to name a fleet replenishment oiler after Harvey Milk because he fought for the rights of his fellow human beings and was assassinated for the effort.

The libs wanted to name vessels after people like Tubman because they fought to end chattel slavery, and for Marshall because he fought for equal rights and treatment for all.

If you want to be on the side that wants to erase such honors, all the while really looking to make sure Jefferson Davis continues to get his day in the sun, you have to at some point ask if maybe you are the baddies.

But, of course, that’s just one point of view. Lee, or at least a mythologized version of him, remains a revered figure among many Southerners, and they see stripping his names off as a direct insult to their heritage. And, while one would hope Marshall’s work as a civil rights leader would be honored by all, he was certainly a controversial figure as a Supreme Court justice, including on issues like capital punishment. And, like it or not, gay rights remains a controversial issue, albeit thankfully less so over time.***

If we’re going to make politically motivated naming of things like naval vessels, we should not be surprised if those on the other side resent it. Again, the usual response is tit-for-tat rather than renaming. But we’ve now opened the door to renaming things named to send a message, as was the case for the various military bases.***

*Pun unintentiona,l but I nonetheless enjoy it.

**Despite having lived in Troy and taught at what was then Troy State University for four years, I had somehow not known or at least forgotten that Lewis was born and raised in Troy and got into the civil rights struggle, and contacted Martin Luther King Jr., over his being denied admission to Troy State.

***It’s worth noting that, while Milk’s claim to fame was as a gay rights activist, he (and San Francisco Mayor George Moskone) was murdered over an employment dispute, not his politics.

****In this particular case, I don’t think it was so much that Hegseth and company were giant fans of Braxton Bragg or Henry Benning but that they had a personal attachment to the old base names. Indeed, I went to Airborne School at Benning in 1989 (and the then-Fort Rucker, now-Fort Novosel in 1987) and, despite having a master’s in political science and being more curious than most about such things, never once questioned who the bases were named after.