Wichita honors LGBTQ Pride while Hegseth’s Navy tries to sink it | Opinion
In the never-ending battle for LGBTQ rights, two things happened Tuesday half a continent apart.
One made me more proud to be a Wichitan. The other made me less proud to be an American.
In Wichita, the City Council passed and presented a resolution honoring Pride Month. The same day, CBS News broke the story that former Fox News talking head and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is ordering the renaming of a Navy ship honoring Harvey Milk, a gay rights icon and San Francisco Supervisor assassinated in his City Hall office in 1978.
In normal times, passing a Pride Month resolution in Wichita is not all that controversial. The City Council’s been doing it for years.
But these are not normal times. We’re in the midst of a great regression of rights of LGBTQ people.
The clash over LGBTQ rights has been in the spotlight at City Hall since March, when a proclamation honoring Transgender Day of Visibility went mysteriously unsigned by Mayor Lily Wu, who delegated the presentation to council member Maggie Ballard.
That has led to 22 ethics complaints against the mayor, which are currently under consideration by the city’s Ethics Board, and efforts by some Sedgwick County Republican precinct committee members to formally censure Republican council member Becky Tuttle, who cast one of four votes giving the proclamation a majority on the seven-member council.
In a stunning turnaround, Wu and all six council members voted to honor Pride Month, although the votes were split between two proclamations — one sponsored by the local Pride organization and another put forward by council member Dalton Glasscock, who is gay.
Both proposals received majority approval in the city’s clunky and goofy email voting process for approving ceremonial proclamations. Glasscock’s was jettisoned because the other proclamation had gotten the required four votes first.
Wu voted yes on Glasscock’s proposal and was listed as “did not reply” on the other one. But she did sign the proclamation and read it aloud from the council chamber podium.
It was pretty much the same as last year’s Pride Month proclamation, but maybe it should have been different.
This was among the whereases:
“Whereas our nation was founded upon and is guided by a set of principles that includes that every person has been created equal, that each has a right to live their life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and that each shall be accorded the full recognition and protection under the law.”
Powerful words. Aspirational words. But words that have been systematically ignored by the current regime in Washington, which is making every effort to erase from American history the accomplishments and contributions of racial and sexual minorities.
Across the federal government, websites have been scrubbed, books have been banned from service academies, and diversity blamed for everything from California wildfires to the tragic crash of a Wichita-to-Washington airliner.
Which brings us to the latest insult to LGBTQ Americans, removing Harvey Milk’s name from the U.S. Navy ship that bears it.
Milk was a Navy submarine officer in the Korean War, but was forced out of the service with a “less than honorable” discharge after being questioned by naval investigators about his sex life. After that, he moved to San Francisco, where he became a leader in the local gay-rights movement.
In 1977, he won election to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors — a city/county body similar to the Unified Government of Wyandotte County and Kansas City, Kansas.
A little less than a year later, he and then-Mayor George Moscone were gunned down in their offices by Dan White — a former supervisor with whom Milk repeatedly clashed on gay rights issues — who had resigned his position and then decided he wanted it back. A jury let him off with a light sentence after his lawyers mounted what became known as the “Twinkie defense,” claiming the shooting stemmed from White’s poor nutritional habits.
I was a college student at the time, writing for a National Public Radio station in the northern part of Los Angeles. The tragedy of the killings and manifest injustice of the outcome put it at the top of the news on our station and across California night after night.
So it’s with great dismay that I watch Hegseth plotting the painting-over of Harvey Milk’s name on the ship that honors his memory.
In a special thumb to the eye of LGBTQ America, this was deliberately planned for Pride Month as an expression of the Trump administration’s determination to make America prejudiced again.
According to a memo that CBS obtained, the ship will be renamed in “alignment with president and SECDEF (secretary of defense) objectives and SECNAV (secretary of the Navy) priorities of reestablishing the warrior culture.”
Harvey Milk was a warrior, until the Navy told him he couldn’t be one anymore because of anti-gay prejudice and bigotry of the day. While that might have been where society was in 1955, it’s inexcusable in 2025.
Of this I am certain: Milk was a better warrior that Pete Hegseth will ever be, because he never stopped fighting for the American values of equality and justice that Hegseth is hell-bent on rolling back.
So Tuesday marked a small step forward for Wichita, and a big step backward for America.
The battle goes on.
