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Garden State Equality and Frivolous Deeds of Treachery
Muhammad Taqi Usmani
“It was a mistake,” you said. But the cruel thing was, it felt like the mistake was mine, for trusting you.” ―David Levithan, The Lover’s Dictionary
Garden State Equality (GSE) is a civic group that supports equality for the LGBT community in New Jersey. Started in 2004 by Steven Goldstein, a college professor and activist, it is run today by 25-year-old Christian Fuscarino. It’s a powerful organization, and you can always expect to find politicians and news media at its events. GSE has involved itself in protests of people — both business professionals and politicians — who they think are on the wrong side of LGBT equality. For instance, GSE’s last protest was against Jack Kelly, an Ocean County Freeholder trying to get a cushy state job, seemingly to pad his pension. A dozen years ago, he wanted to deny pension benefits to the lesbian partner of Laurel Hester, a terminally-ill sheriff’s officer, stating it would “hurt the sanctity of marriage.” Before that, GSE protested US Congressman Scott Garrett, a New Jersey Republican, over a comment he denies making.
We’ve seen the broader LGBT community go after others nationally. A case in point is Brenden Eich who co-founded Mozilla and created the Firefox web browser. When he became CEO, it was discovered that, six years earlier, he had made a $1,000 donation to a group that opposed gay marriage in California. The backlash was so fast and furious that Eich resigned after one week as CEO of the company he helped to build.
I have no qualm with the LGBT community going after such people, but I note — only for perspective — that as recently as 2012, both President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton agreed with GSE’s detractors, saying that marriage was between a man and a woman, at the same time Jack Kelly and Brenden Eich were begin punished for it.
My point is that, on a scale from Harvey Milk (total gay acceptance) to Fred Phelps (total gay hatred), groups like GSE go after people who aren’t exactly horrid, but who disagree with them on a political level, which is GSE’s right to do. Who can argue with a zero tolerance policy on inequality?
That being true, one would think that, if someone came to light who held truly vile attitudes toward LGBT people, who was physically brutal toward them, and who was doing business in the Garden State, that a group like GSE would call themselves to action.
I asked Garden State Equality to involve themselves against just such a person and I’ve been rebuffed. Let me be clear about something and this may seem smug. Actually, I don’t care if it’s smug because it’s true: They owed me. I had the right to expect both their attention and their help. Like a debt, they owed it to me. I’ll explain.
Since before Steven Goldstein founded GSE in 2004, back when Christian Fuscarino was still in middle school, I was writing columns supporting LGBT equality. Note this well: I’m straight, I’m Catholic, and I’m a lifelong member of the Republican Party. On behalf of people like Goldstein and Fuscarino, I bucked my religion, my party, and most everyone I knew to publically support gay marriage. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton didn’t have the stones to do that, and neither of them would have taken the social, professional and political risks I did if they had. I’ve been a true friend; an invested friend.
So yes, call me entitled, because when it comes to the LGBT community, I am. That’s why it was a blow to me when they rebuffed the only request for help from them I’ve ever made, and the request I made was for their own good.
Since January, I’ve written about a man who is truly a human rights monster, Sheikh Muhammad Taqi Usmani, a Pakistani. He’s not an obscure figure. In much of the world he’s a Sharia Law rock star. A Jordanian company ranked him the 22nd most influential Muslim in the world, ahead of Jordan’s own queen. He is the most important person in the growing industry of “Sharia Finance,” advising dozens of powerful companies doing business in the Middle East. He is a mufti (able to give Fatwa), was the author of Pakistan’s Sharia laws, enforced those laws for 30 years as a Sharia appellate judge, and now runs the family madrassa, teaching those laws to 10,000 students a year; a nice supplement to his Sharia Finance income.
He is a monster exactly because of the Sharia laws he wrote and enforced for 30 years. He still espouses them as just at his school. He presided over such brutal things as jailing gays for life for being gay, whipping women who were raped for illegal fornication, and cutting off the hands and feet of petty thieves.
After retiring as a judge, his post graduate work included support for the Taliban, issuing Fatwa against American troops, lamenting that there are not more suicide bombers, as well as supporting the taking of black slaves in North Africa.
You should hate him already. If not, try this on for size: In his book Islam and Modernization, he argued that Muslims should lay in wait in Western countries like America until they have more people, then launch “Jihad with Power.” He said the killing should continue until our culture is broken and we submit to his religion.
That matches exactly the beliefs of the Orlando terrorist who just killed 49 gays and matches the San Bernardino killers too.
So what is the New Jersey connection?
Sheikh Usmani is the chairman of a Sharia Advisory Board that is employed by a company called Capital Guidance who, through a subsidiary, sells Sharia-compliant mortgages in 23 US states, with a New Jersey office in Elmwood Park. Their own materials say that the board actively “scrutinize[s] the program to ensure
that our initiatives are always Shariah compliant.”
What is the Asbury Park connection?
Capital Guidance has another subsidiary called Madison Marquette. It is a real estate holding company and its property includes every building on Asbury Park’s boardwalk, including Convention Hall, as well as the Stone Pony and the Wonder Bar. They keep an office right on the boardwalk.
Sheikh Usmani is no Brendan Eich, Scott Garrett, or Jack Kelly. Rather, he’s someone who advocates for and — for 30 years — presided over a legal system that sentences people to life in prison or capital punishment for gay sex.
For months, I have asked Garden State Equality to makes some sort of play against Sheikh Usmani’s business interest here, even if it’s just a statement. After several prods, the only response I got from Fuscarino was that it would take too much time to look into it (and then he took the time to suspend my ability to leave comments about Usmani on their Facebook page). I offered him all my research, which (by the way) was originally challenged by the Sheikh’s company’s lawyers, until they read it and backed off.
It’s odd that Garden State Equality has no time to protest a man who put gays in jail for 30 years, yet had time last year to protest Spencer’s Gifts down at the mall, because they committed the shocking human rights infraction of selling a Caitlyn Jenner Halloween mask. Good grief. Excuse my sarcasm… no wait…accept my sarcasm, because that’s frivolousness posing as righteousness. You’ve got a much bigger fish to fry here, Fuscarino.
I tried to contact Steven Goldstein on Facebook to get him to look at this issue The man who describes himself as “more Jewish than Gay” and therefore has twice the reason to oppose Usmani, responded to me by blocking me on Facebook.
On this coming Saturday, June 18, Garden State Equality will have its annual Pride Walk in Asbury Park, and they will walk right past the offices of the company that employs Sheikh Usmani. I’ve asked that they make some protest as they go by and they won’t.
Their day starts with speeches at Kennedy Park, usually with such luminaries as Congressman Frank Pallone. I’ve asked if I can be added to the speaker’s list, and offered to even let Garden State Equality review my remarks first to suggest edits. Their response has been to ignore me.
That is their right, and there is nothing I can do about it. But, as Garden State Equality walks past the office of Sheikh Usmani’s employer on Saturday, there will be a homosexual languishing in a Pakistani prison and there is nothing he can do about it, either.
It’s phony tough to beat your chest like King Kong in the face of people such as Brendan Eich and Scott Garrett. To oppose Usmani, whose philosophy mirrors the man who just killed 49 gays, is hard, but the days of hiding in closets from bigots is supposed to be over.
Dante’s 9th circle of hell, the worst of them, is reserved for traitors to their own kind.
Published in Culture
It is always interesting that so many “rights” groups violently oppose micro-aggressions at home and ignore macro-aggressions abroad.
It’s hard not to see their refusal in one of two ways.
It could be cowardice knowing that actual harm could result from doing what they ostensibly do: stand up for gay rights and bring attention to those who hate or persecute gays. That’s understandable if not laudable.
It could also be that they’re not really interested in gay rights or equality but are more interested in punishing people who offended them in the past. That’s even less laudable but more likely.
When this discrepancy has been brought up in the past, haven’t social justice warriors said “Well DUH, those people will kill you” as a reason for not speaking up against such people?
Wow. “Hypocrisy” doesn’t even begin to describe this lunacy. The Left is truly stupid.
Killing and jailing people for being gay? Meh.
Now if he said he supported the biblical definition of marriage and then went around trying to sell chicken sandwiches . . . now that would be cause for outrage.
I suppose they could kill me too for speaking up, but let’s hope the day never comes that we bow down to fear like that.
It is in times like this when the curtain gets pulled back a bit on the actual motives of the organized Left. The truth is that it is rarely, if ever, really about these groups’ stated ’cause’. Its never really about ‘the environment’ or ‘equality’ or ‘civil rights’ or ‘common sense gun control’ or whatever. Maybe it is about those things among the rank and file. But not among the upper echelons. For them, its about using those ’causes’ as cudgels to destroy the fabric of Western economies and civil society.
The trouble with identity politics is that sooner or later politics will always trump identity.
Tommy, I think you have not been the champion for the cause you thought you were championing.
You are so right. I thought the cause I was fighting for was keeping government unobtrusive. Turned out I was fighting for government’s obtrusive insistence on wedding cakes.
If Mona Charen called me a “useful idiot” right now, I wouldn’t argue with her.
My life has changed since first publishing this material in January (I’ve done several follow-ups).
Political correctness is pervasive. People are so afraid to be mistaken for saying all Muslims are bad, they won’t say even ONE Muslim is bad, even a guy who wrote a book saying they should be killed.
Instead of rejecting Usmani, my hometown’s reaction has been to reject me. I’ve been called every name you an imagine (Islamophobe, fear monger, etc.). I’ve lost friends (many who say I risk killing tourism). I’ve been told that life long friends are telling others to stay clear of me and anything I write about the Shiekh.
He avows terrorism, issues Fatwa against our troops, brutalizes gays, whips women, yet somehow I turned out to be the bad guy.
My social life is ruined. I’ve been told I’m unwelcomed on the boardwalk.
The problem is I’m no activist, so I don’t know what to do besides write.
I was standing at the kitchen counter when I started to read this and really had to sit down before I fell down.
I can’t begin to say how grateful I feel right now for Ricochet, because it gives me a chance to correspond with incredibly decent people like you, Mr. De Seno.
I’m going to make more of an effort to deserve it.
That’s awfully generous of you!
I’m so sorry, Tommy. I didn’t agree with you on the marriage debate, but I know you were arguing from your principles. You certainly don’t deserve this. How to fight this kind of sleight of hand? I really don’t know.
I don’t think I can fight it.
In America, as we saw again this weekend, we don’t connect dots. To do so would be bigoted and phobic.
No, we wait until after an attack, then scream at ourselves for not having a system in place to connect the dots. We accuse everyone with a badge for “missing it.”
I think you’ve correctly identified the motive. Those prone to the identity activist persuasion seem to be mainly driven by a revenge fetish. They don’t even accept that society changes, thus the hoax hate incidents and incessant calls for victim status.
Keep writing – your posts are among the very best on Ricochet.
Re: 14
They’re driven by a desire for power. They don’t care how wicked their methods are for obtaining power. They don’t care what kind of damage they do, to any and everyone, to obtain that power.
Thank you for bringing this to our attention, Tommy. I live in the greater Princeton area and I had no idea this was going on. GSE’s response has been despicable but depressingly predictable.
I do wonder, now that marriage equality is a non-issue, if gays are going to start to question their allegiance to a progressivism that is terrified of offending those who would gladly see them dead. Gateway Pundit recently came out as gay, and an anonymous gay just wrote on PJ Media that he’s renouncing liberalism for its stance on radical Islam. Here’s hoping they turn a few heads.
A friend of mine works counter-terrorism for the FBI in New Jersey. I’m sure you two would have a lot to chat about.
That’s too kind – way too kind – but thank you.
I’d LOVE to talk to him.
My biggest question is how we allow a company to send money to a guy who wrote a book saying Jihadists should lay in wait and kill us.
Some of the things I haven’t put on Ricochet about this Shiekh:
-A person attached to his school turned out to be a guy running a company in Afghanistan who was the money transport for bin Laden;
– Last February a person who studied at his school for the last 7 years got arrested for being a part of ISIS;
-Not long ago the Pakistani government rounded up the heads of certain madrassas because they found many bank accounts held by terrorist groups were opened in the name of the schools. Usmani was one of the ones they brought in, the result of which was that he(and the others) now have to register all school bank accounts with the government.
People are asking today why the Orlando gunman was able to get a gun.
I’m asking why the US is allowing us to send money to Usmani.
I’m asking why a guy who said Jihadi should lay in wait in the West until they have enough people to launch “Jihad with Power” is allowed to populate America in 23 states with Sharia Adherents by giving them Sharia compliant mortgages.
Brusha . . . brusha . . . brusha.
Islam trumps Gay in the pecking order of SJW concerns.
Plus staff meetings might get a lot more interesting if a “lone wolf” extremist happens by.
This. Drew in Wisconsin has been arguing this for a while, and so have many of my family members.
For now what you will hear are inane tropes, such as “Homophobia is indistinguishable from Islamophobia.”
Using both extreme violence and the old tried-and-true Stalinist method of disinformation, aided by a Left that encompasses the profoundly ignorant, the overtly evil, and everything in between, and fighting a punch-drunk culture that, despite repeated blows to the head, appears unaware it’s even in the ring, Islam will land a decisive win in the progressive competition for most victimy.
Once CAIR is actually on top, it will suddenly find that, in fact, homophobia is awesome. Just wait.
” fighting a punch drunk culture…”
That is such a perfect description of contemporary politics.
Amazing post. Amazing commentary. Thanks, all…