OPINION:
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has ordered the U.S. Navy to rename the USNS Harvey Milk — and that’s the right thing to do (“Hegseth orders Navy to rename ship named for gay rights activist Harvey Milk,” Web, June 3). Naming the ship for Milk was an insult to all who honorably served.
Milk did not receive an honorable discharge when he resigned from the navy; he received an other than honorable (OTH) discharge. Back in the 1950s, it was often called an “undesirable” discharge.
Harvey Milk is viewed by many on the political left as some sort of heroic gay civil rights leader who was unjustly kicked out of the military just for being gay. That is a lie. Milk got an OTH discharge in lieu of court martial — not just because he was gay, but because he was having sex with U.S. Navy enlisted personnel. That is forbidden behavior for any officer; it is called illegal fraternization and is a crime for officers under Article 134 in the Uniform Code of Military Justice. It does not matter whether the person with whom the officer had relations worked for the officer directly. All officers are told they can be court-martialed for this as part of their training. I guess Milk didn’t think the law applied to him.
Milk was the one who requested the OTH to escape a general court-martial conviction, which would have likely gotten him a dismissal discharge (akin to a dishonorable discharge for an enlisted person) and probably some jail time. He would thus have been a convicted felon.
It does not matter whether the enlisted sailors were male or female and willingly consented to the sex. With today’s “woke” culture, a subordinate does not have free will to consent to anything involving anyone in a senior-management position. So I guess you could say the military’s century-old ban on fraternization was ahead of its time.
Cmdr. WAYNE L. JOHNSON
Judge Advocate General’s Corps, U.S. Navy (retired)
Alexandria, Virginia
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