Among the myriad ways the Trump administration is working hard to dismantle the federal government, the Defense Department seems to be purging people who are not cis, straight, white men from their website, including iconic Golden Girls actress Bea Arthur.
As part of President Donald Trump’s efforts to roll back DEI initiatives (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion), the Department of Defense (DoD) has deleted Arthur’s trailblazing contributions to the Marine Corps.
Along with the accomplishments of other female veterans, the webpage dedicated to Arthur was deleted with only her enlistment photo remaining on the site and a “404 page not found” warning connected to the former link, The Pink News reports.
Long before gay audiences fell in love with Arthur when she played boundary-pushing, strong female characters first on Maude and then on Golden Girls, Arthur became one of the first women to join the U.S. Marine Corps Women’s Reserve. Arthur — then known as Bernice Frankel — joined the Marines in 1943 during World War II, just five days after they began recruiting women, according to the National World War II Museum.
Arthur served as a typist at the Marine Corps headquarters in Washington D.C. before becoming a truck driver and dispatcher at the Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, North Carolina, between 1944 and 1945 and then left the military at the rank of staff sergeant.
The Internet Archive database shows that the "404 warning" on the DoD website's page for Arthur was there back as far back as March 17, but it appears that at some point today, as criticisms have been leveled at the government by fans, Arthur’s page has been returned, and her history within the U.S. Marine Corps is viewable by the public again.
Arthur isn’t the only famous name whose contributions were scrubbed, legendary baseball player Jackie Robinson, who was the first Black player in Major League Baseball, was also removed from the DoD website.
And because anything with the word “gay” in it apparently can’t be allowed to stay on the DoD website, photos of the Enola Gay aircraft that dropped an atomic bomb on Japan are also marked for deletion by the administration, alongside photos of the first women to pass Marine infantry training, the Associate Press reports.
