Sean Penn dubs Hegseth ‘Chief Petty Officer' for effort to strip Harvey Milk's name from Navy ship
Sean Penn, who played Harvey Milk on the big screen, is ripping Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for reportedly ordering the Navy to strip an oil ship of its name honoring the gay rights activist.
'I've never before seen a Secretary of Defense so aggressively demote himself to the rank of Chief PETTY Officer,' Penn said in a Wednesday statement to The Hollywood Reporter.
According to Military.com, a memorandum from the Navy secretary's office stated that plans were in the works to rename the oiler USNS Harvey Milk.
'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,' chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said in a statement about the move, which pointedly came at the beginning of Pride Month.
'Any potential renaming(s) will be announced after internal reviews are complete,' Parnell said.
Penn won an Academy Award for taking on the title role in the 2008 film 'Milk.'
The first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California when he became a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Milk was assassinated in 1978.
Screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, who also took home an Oscar for his work on 'Milk,' called Hegseth's order 'yet another move to distract and to fuel the culture wars that create division.'
Calling Milk a 'civil rights icon,' Black told The Hollywood Reporter, 'That's not going to change. Renaming a ship isn't going to change that.'
'These guys are idiots,' the scribe said, adding that Hegseth 'does not seem like a smart man, a wise man, a knowledgeable man. He seems small and petty.'
'I would love to introduce him to some LGBTQ folks who are warriors who have had to be warriors our entire life just to live our lives openly as who we are,' Black said.
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