October 22 2025, 08:15 
Ibrar Nadeem, an aide to Republican Jack Ciattarelli’s New Jersey gubernatorial campaign, claimed that, if the candidate wins next month’s election, he will “ban” marriage between two people of the same sex. Ciattarelli is now claiming that anyone who quotes Nadeem is “lying.”
Nadeem, who is the executive director for Muslim relations for the Ciatterelli campaign, was speaking at a Muslims4JackToo rally on Saturday when he started extolling the candidate’s opposition to marriage rights: “We want to have a ban on same-sex marriage. And I know my brother voted against it. And he will do it again.”
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“We talk about family. A family comes into place when a man and a woman get married without the same sex,” he said as the crowd cheered. “We oppose same-sex, we oppose same-sex marriage.”
“I am the first gubernatorial candidate in history that has a Muslim as part of his inner circle of advisors, and that advisor is Dr. Ibrar Nadeem,” Ciattarelli said during his comments at the event. He spoke after Nadeem but did not comment on Nadeem’s statement that he is against marriage equality.
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Ciattarelli was a member of the New Jersey General Assembly in the 2010s. According to the New Jersey Globe, he voted against a bill to legalize marriage equality in 2012.
That bill passed the state’s legislature but was vetoed by then-Gov. Chris Christie (R). Marriage equality was legalized by the state supreme court a year later, and weddings between people of the same sex began in October 2013, almost two years before the U.S. Supreme Court legalized marriage equality in all 50 states.
On X, independent journalist Michael Matthews posted a video of Nadeem making comments about Jewish people during his speech.
“Vote for Jack, one more thing before we go,” Nadeem later said. “Every time I got tired, people from my community, when I was blamed that, somebody said that you are taking money from Jews. I said, check my bank account every day, brother. It is not there.”
#NJ gubernatorial candidate Jack Ciattarelli is getting an endorsement so big, it might lead to victory (Lakewood Vaad). He made an appearance with Muslims4Jack too “We want to have a ban on same-sex marriage…I was blamed that somebody said you are taking money from Jews.” https://t.co/3Lz4jHXWQv pic.twitter.com/ap71tBQEX9
— Michael Matthews (@mcm1071989) October 20, 2025
Marriage equality is now popular in the Garden State, so much so that the state passed a law codifying same-sex marriage rights in 2021, should courts ever overturn their decisions legalizing it. This may explain why Ciattarelli now says that his “inner circle” advisor, Nadeem, spoke out of turn.
Late Monday evening on X, Ciattarelli accused his opponent, Democratic congresswoman Mikie Sherrill, of “lying” about his opposition to marriage equality.
“You know I support same sex marriage,” Ciattarelli wrote. He then said that people aren’t seeing the full context of Nadeem’s comments about Jewish people, where he “was talking about the grief he gets from some BECAUSE of my unwavering support for the Jewish community and Israel and his own efforts to build bridges between Muslim and non-Muslim communities.”
His message did not explain why or how Nadeem got his position on marriage equality wrong.
Ciattarelli’s campaign website does not mention marriage equality, but it does contain an anti-LGBTQ+ campaign promise. In the section about education, the site states: “Jack will implement a true Parents’ Bill of Rights that provides transparency to parents by requiring K-12 curriculum sources to be posted online at the beginning of each school year, and reform requirements for sexual and social education to make content age-appropriate for elementary, middle school-aged, and high school children.”
Parents’ Bill of Rights legislation has appeared across the country in the last five years, generally with the promise of shielding children from the knowledge that LGBTQ+ people exist. The goal is for parents to have the “right” to indoctrinate their children into hating LGBTQ+ people.
Ciattarelli has been outspoken about how LGBTQ+ people should not be mentioned in schools, saying in 2021 during his previous gubernatorial campaign: “You won’t have to deal with it when I’m governor, but we’re not teaching gender ID and sexual orientation to kindergarteners… We’re not teaching sodomy in sixth grade. And we’re going to roll back the LGBTQ curriculum. It goes too far.”
Implying that schools are teaching children the ins and outs of sexual intercourse between two men – instead of just reading books about two male penguins raising a child together – is a common homophobic rhetorical strategy. New Jersey’s then-new law about LGBTQ+ curriculum required school boards to develop lessons about “the contributions to society made by LGBT individuals,” not the mechanics of gay sex.
“Who the hell does Jack Ciattarelli think he is? By equating LGBTQ relationships with ‘sodomy,’ Jack is now Frankenstein’s clone of Marjorie Taylor Greene for New Jersey,” Steven Goldstein, the founder of the New Jersey LGBTQ+ organization Garden State Equality, said at the time. “He is a fringe crackpot who operates in a galaxy far, far away from bipartisan human decency.”
New Jersey is one of two states where people will vote for a new governor this November. The other state is Virginia, where the GOP candidate handwrites notes about how she’s “morally opposed” to marriage equality. She claims that opposing marriage equality and firing people for being gay are not forms of discrimination.
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