Tomorrow, November 10, marks the 246th birthday of our beloved Marine Corps, and we thought it might be appropriate to commemorate the day by noting the recent christening of a U.S. Navy ship in honor of a brave young Marine who’d given his life for his country.

Unfortunately, there’s been no such dedication recently — certainly not for one of the 13 fallen warriors who were killed by an ISIS-K suicide bomber in Kabul, Afghanistan, on August 26. There was, however, a ship christened for a former Navy sailor who died in 1978, and whose death many years after he’d been less-than-honorably discharged from the Navy had absolutely nothing to do with his military service.

Harvey Milk was privileged, though: He was gay, he was outspoken, and he was murdered in 1978, along with San Francisco Mayor George Moscone, by an angry straight white male and former fellow city supervisor, Dan White. And so, Milk gets a ship named after him — and he didn’t even have to win a key military victory or save the lives of his fellow warriors to do so. Nor did other recent and soon-to-be Navy ship namesakes such as Cesar Chavez, John Murtha, Gabby Giffords, Sojourner Truth, Earl Warren, Bobby Kennedy, Lucy Stone, and John Lewis.

Marines — at least enlisted ones — tend to have to jump on live grenades in order to have Navy ships named for them. A remarkably brave young man, Corporal Jason Dunham, comes immediately to mind. As does Sergeant Rodney Davis.

Milk’s nephew, Stuart Milk, and Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro watched the “traditional” ceremony, and a “transgender” person named Paula M. Neira, a former Navy officer who’s now the clinical program director for the John Hopkins Center for Transgender Health, smashed a bottle of champagne on the bow.

“The secretary of the Navy needed to be here today,” said Secretary Del Toro, speaking of himself in the third person, “not just to amend the wrongs of the past, but to give inspiration to all of our LGBTQ community leaders who served in the Navy, in uniform today, and in the civilian workforce as well too, and to tell them that we’re committed to them in the future.”

To its credit, the Navy did, on March 7, 2020, finally get around to naming a warship for 98-year-old Woody Williams, an intrepid flamethrower who’d earned the Medal of Honor for his conspicuous gallantry at Iwo Jima some 75 years earlier.

But while the U.S. Navy is dedicating ships to gay men who never served in combat, our most deeply determined geopolitical foes are earnestly training for war.

As The Wall Street Journal reports:

China appears to have built models with the dimensions of a U.S. aircraft carrier and other warships in a western desert. … Satellite imagery from a remote desert in the western Xinjiang region of China that the PLA uses for exercises shows outlines in the shape of a Nimitz-class carrier and at least two Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, according to details provided by two Colorado-based firms. The findings show the carrier-size structure appears to be built on railway tracks to enable its movement.

Joe Biden’s Pentagon press secretary, John Kirby, didn’t want to talk about the ChiComs and their life-size U.S. warship mock-ups, saying that he hadn’t seen the images.

That’s okay, John. We’ve seen the images. Besides, you’ve probably got some woke warship functions to attend to.

The Biden administration has done plenty of violence to the morale and esprit of our fighting forces, and the decadent dedication of this Navy ship is just the latest example. Just imagine the pride and the excitement that our military and civilian personnel must feel when they climb aboard our Navy’s newest vessel: the USNS Harvey Milk.