What do you get when you statutorily rape teenage boys? A prison sentence? Scorn and ostracism? If you’re “homosexual rights activist” Harvey Milk (shown), the answer is a U.S. Navy ship named in your honor.
The move is the handiwork of Obama appointee Ray Mabus, secretary of the Navy, who signed a July 14 notification indicating that “he intended to name a planned Military Sealift Command fleet oiler USNS Harvey Milk (T-AO-206),” reports USNI News. The site also tells us, “Over the last several years, there have been pushes from California politicians to have a ship named for Milk since the 2011 repeal of the Department of Defense’s ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy. Naming a ship after Milk, ‘will further send a green light to all the brave men and women who serve our nation that honesty, acceptance and authenticity are held up among the highest ideals of our military,’ said Milk’s nephew Stuart Milk in a statement to San Diego LGBT Weekly in 2012.” Yet this assertion is ironic given that there’s little honest and authentic about the myth built around Milk.
And that myth has been long in the making. Milk’s claim to fame is being the first openly homosexual man elected to public office in a major U.S. city (San Francisco City-County Board in 1977) — and being murdered by a disgruntled fellow Democrat. That martyrdom led to the creation of Harvey Milk Day, which is governmentally recognized as a “day of significance” in California public schools. He has also been given a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama and has been honored with a U.S. postage stamp. And now his name will defile a Navy vessel.
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This is despite Milk’s claim to infamy being far greater — albeit less well known. The Family Research Council’s Peter Sprigg noted that “Milk is famous only for winning one election, being murdered — and having sex with men,” but even this understates the matter. For as with fellow leftist icon Gore Vidal, Milk was a pederast. And like so many sexual abusers, Milk preyed on the vulnerable, with even friend and biographer Randy Shilts writing that “Harvey always had a penchant for young waifs with substance abuse problems.”
But unlike Vidal, who apparently avoided violation of U.S. law by limiting his sexual predations to Thailand, Milk committed statutory rape. One of his victims was a 16-year-old runaway from Maryland named Jack Galen McKinley (age of consent in California is 18). Columnist Matt Barber, calling Milk “demonstrably, categorically an evil man,” wrote of the pederast’s relationship with McKinley and other adolescent males:
In his [Shilts’] glowing book “The Mayor of Castro Street,” he wrote of Milk’s “relationship” with the McKinley boy: ”… Sixteen-year-old McKinley was looking for some kind of father figure…. At 33, Milk was launching a new life, though he could hardly have imagined the unlikely direction toward which his new lover would pull him.”
… Randy Thomasson, child advocate and founder of SaveCalifornia.com, is one of the nation’s foremost experts on Harvey Milk. Of the Shilts biography, Thomasson notes, “Explaining Milk’s many flings and affairs with teenagers and young men, Randy Shilts writes how Milk told one ‘lover’ why it was OK for him to also have multiple relationships simultaneously: ‘As homosexuals, we can’t depend on the heterosexual model.… We grow up with the heterosexual model, but we don’t have to follow it. We should be developing our own lifestyle. There’s no reason why you can’t love more than one person at a time.’”
Whereas McKinley, a disturbed runaway boy, desperately sought a “father figure” to provide empathy, compassion, wisdom and direction, he instead found Harvey Milk: a promiscuous sexual predator who found, in McKinley, an opportunity to satisfy a perverse lust for underage flesh.
Years later McKinley committed suicide.
Whether or not Milk had some of McKinley’s blood on his hands, it wouldn’t be the only blood. Just consider his relationship with the notorious Jim Jones, the atheistic Marxist mass murderer who self-style himself a “reverend.” As Daniel J. Flynn wrote at City Journal in 2009:
Nine days prior to Milk’s death, more than 900 followers of Jim Jones — many of them campaign workers for Milk — perished in the most ghastly set of murder-suicides in modern history. Before the congregants of the Peoples Temple drank Jim Jones’s deadly Kool-Aid, Harvey Milk and much of San Francisco’s ruling class had already figuratively imbibed. Milk occasionally spoke at Jones’s San Francisco-based headquarters, promoted Jones through his newspaper columns, and defended the Peoples Temple from its growing legion of critics. Jones provided conscripted “volunteers” for Milk’s campaigns to distribute leaflets by the tens of thousands. Milk returned the favor by abusing his position of public trust on behalf of Jones’s criminal endeavors.
“Rev. Jones is widely known in the minority communities here and elsewhere as a man of the highest character, who has undertaken constructive remedies for social problems which have been amazing in their scope and effectiveness,” Supervisor Milk wrote President Jimmy Carter seven months before the Jonestown carnage. The purpose of Milk’s letter was to aid and abet his powerful supporter’s abduction of a six-year-old boy. Milk’s missive to the president prophetically continued: “Not only is the life of a child at stake, who currently has loving and protective parents in the Rev. and Mrs. Jones, but our official relations with Guyana could stand to be jeopardized, to the potentially great embarrassment of our State Department.” John Stoen, the boy whose actual parents Milk libeled to the president as purveyors of “bold-faced lies” and blackmail attempts, perished at Jonestown. This, the only remarkable episode in Milk’s brief tenure on the San Francisco board of supervisors, is swept under the rug by his hagiographers.
Note that 275 other children perished at Jonestown along with Stoen.
Little if any of the above has been presented in the various books and movies created about Milk, works including the 2008 eponymous film starring Sean Penn and a children’s picture book entitled The Harvey Milk Story. Yet elevating sexual predators is nothing new for the Left. Hollywood also made a flattering movie about “sex researcher” Alfred Kinsey (Kinsey, 2004), a pedophile who used pseudo-science as a cover for his child abuse. And the first openly homosexual member of Congress, Gerry Studds (D-Mass.), had a 1983 sexual affair with a teenage male page but nonetheless was re-elected until his retirement in 1997.
Former Louisiana governor Edwin Edwards (D) once quipped before his 1983 gubernatorial contest that the “only way I can lose this election is if I’m caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy.” It appears that at least one of those eventualities is no longer a disqualifier for public office — or for being honored by those already in it. And when we’re naming Navy vessels after pederastic rapists, we have to wonder for how much longer the good ship America can stay afloat.
1977 photo of Harvey Milk: AP Images
