Abdul El-Sayed<\/a> acknowledged that some LGBTQ voters had expressed discomfort with his efforts to court voters and political organizations whose religious or ideological positions were openly hostile to homosexuality, but insisted his campaign was working hard to find common ground.<\/p>\n“We have to remember that tolerance means accepting people whose beliefs may be different from our own,” El-Sayed explained to reporters after a rally, adding that his campaign was committed to defending LGBTQ rights while also respecting the deeply held religious convictions of Muslim’s newest LGBTQ coalition partners.<\/p>\n
“We don’t expect everyone in our coalition to agree on everything,” El-Sayed continued. “Some people believe gay Americans deserve equal rights, while others believe gay Americans deserve something considerably different. That’s what makes our movement so beautifully diverse.”<\/p>\n
El-Sayed’s campaign circulated a revised coalition-building memo advising LGBTQ voters to emphasize shared opposition to Republicans while avoiding discussions about homosexuality, religious law, women’s rights, or anything else that might remind coalition partners they were campaigning alongside one another.<\/p>\n
At press time, El-Sayed’s campaign had announced a new interfaith LGBTQ outreach initiative designed to promote mutual understanding, beginning with a rooftop panel discussion in which gay activists would be asked to explain their concerns to Muslim representatives.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
DETROIT, MICHIGAN \u2014 Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed moved Wednesday to reassure LGBTQ voters that reports of gay people being thrown off rooftops by Islamist extremists should not be viewed as a reason to question his growing outreach to Muslim voters, explaining at a campaign stop that such practices were simply a matter of cultural […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":38368,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[404,912,189,223,1114],"class_list":["post-38367","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-politics","tag-democrat","tag-election","tag-lgbtq","tag-muslim","tag-rated-pg"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailysoak.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38367","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailysoak.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailysoak.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailysoak.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailysoak.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38367"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailysoak.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38367\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailysoak.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38368"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailysoak.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38367"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailysoak.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38367"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailysoak.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38367"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}