Abdul El-Sayed To Headline Islamic Event Alongside Pakistani Cleric Who Forced His 13-Year-Old Niece Into Marriage, Was Denounced for ‘Pedophilic Rhetoric’

A guy running for Senate in Michigan is choosing, of his own free will, to share a stage over Labor Day weekend with a cleric who has admitted to marrying off his own 13-year-old niece. Not accused. Admitted. That's not a guilt-by-association smear, that's a scheduling decision El-Sayed's campaign made and apparently didn't think twice about.

If a Republican candidate did this, it would be the only story in America for a month. Every cable panel, every op-ed, every "what does this say about the party" think piece would run on a loop. Instead we get silence, because the standard for who counts as "extreme" seems to depend entirely on which side of the aisle you're standing on when the story breaks.

This isn't about Islam. Plenty of Muslim Americans would be horrified to see a man tied to child marriage headlining anything, let alone an event with a Senate candidate attached to it. This is about a candidate's judgment, full stop. Who you choose to stand next to tells voters something real about what you're willing to overlook to get where you're going.

Michigan voters deserve a straight answer from El-Sayed, not a statement written by three staffers to make the problem go away. Did he know who this man was? Does he still think it was fine? Those are the only questions that matter here, and so far nobody seems interested in asking them out loud.