https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_by_country_or_territory

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/most

Just wanna add in case people haven't encountered these nuanced interactions: my cousin and her husband are both atheists that think being gay is a choice and trans people are mentally ill. Religious beliefs or lack thereof don't guarantee someone will be ethically or morally upstanding

In the same way that posts about kids donating their money to pay off others kids school lunch debt, or charities paying for cancer patients care are bad because they focus on the positive to that specific person instead of the shitty situation that causes them to be in that position in the first place, yes

No one's talking about removing choice. But not all choices are equally valid. And many choices are coerced due to religious patriarchal structures which are not actually true choices

You could also frame it as liberals being on the side of religious freedom, though, which might include this shit, and which women might partake in voluntarily as it's a part of them practicing their faith. There's not really a lot of oppression that comes about as a result of wearing the headdress alone as like, a kind of stylistic or ritual choice, it's most everything else that goes along with it, that entails the oppression.

It's more complex than lib vs non lib, or, freedom vs non freedom. Freedom can't be the highest value, there, there has to be something more at the core there. Freedom is usually just a proxy for whatever other value you're implicitly substituting. One person says, I need the freedom to have my guns, for self protection. Another person, they say they want the ability to be free from a society in which gun ownership is seen as necessary for self-defense, or is common. You hear boo boo platitudes like "my freedom ends where yours begins" and shit like that as an attempt to cope with it, but it's totally meaningless. There has to be a core value there.

In this case, the core value is basically just the belief that islam is a false religion, and is bigoted and oppressive. Possibly correct for many muslims, perhaps the majority, but still, would be a generalization, and would still be based on a very specific reading of the text, just like it is with christianity, or extremist violent folk buddhism that people in the west don't usually get exposed to, or, hinduism, which is where the basis for their caste system comes from.

The idiocy, I think, so far as I see it, is that they decry the religion itself, because they see it as all being the same, rather than decrying this or that specific practice as being bigoted. Not even the hijab necessarily, but like, the patriarchal aspects. Much harder to decry these on the basis of the religions themselves if you're not versed in the religions themselves, too, which is a pretty hard sticking point.

In any case, it's sort of like, people decrying christianity at large as being shitty when realistically they just mean like, evangelicals, or catholics, or mormons, or jehovah's witnesses, or maybe in some odd cases, quakers and mennonites. But then they don't realize it also entails liberation theology, rastafarianism, the ethiopian church, or even just small unaffiliated churches, and shit like that. Smaller in number than the oppressive megachurches, and still exist within an overarching system in which religion is kind of oppressive, but still, I think, retains some value as a cultural or ritualistic practice, and retains it's link to history and tradition, which, despite, you know, the common post-historical liberal cries, you know, the idea that the west is post-enlightenment, we have no need for tradition, yadda yadda, is still something that people find really appealing. We still see that with people wanting to return to some idealized version of the 50's that never existed where everyone was able to afford a suburban home and 2.5 kids, without understanding that those things were not available for everyone, weren't sustainable, your wife was on opioids, you worked a 9-5 in a steel mill, your kids went either unsupervised or helicopter parented every day, and the indoors were full of smoke while the outside was full of leaded gasoline fumes. The appeal to tradition, to belonging as part of an in-group, is extremely powerful, even if it doesn't tangibly exist for someone in physical reality. It's escapism, but it's escapism through which someone travels with it back into the real world, a changed person.

That's all to say. Uhh. Yeah, islamophobia is bad, probably. The middle east is still pretty fucked up. So is the west, which is mostly not much better, despite the cries in opposition. Our freedom loving leader, their despotic dictator, etc. I'm sure liberating all that oil from iraq and killing a million people helped that one out plenty, helped them be more progressive, helped civilize them, right? I'm sure the like. US foreign intervention and fucking with the arab spring really helped everything out. I think it's libya or syria that still hasn't recovered, right? Don't know. This video goes out to the brave mujahideen fighters, is what I'm saying.