I dont know of any American woman who got attacked by a angry mob or were arrested by “morality police” from not wearing a bra, makeup or wearing flats instead of heels.
Even working in a non-client facing position in a conservative bank, most of my female coworkers didnt wear heels, they wore jeans and a top, etc.
This part seems easy to answer (IMO, anyway) - because most of the conservative “concern” over the hijab, or gay rights in the Middle East, or similar issues, is hypocritical and based on bigotry. They (many of them, at least, including the vast majority of the Republicans in office who bring up these issues) want a cudgel to beat up Muslims, rather than any particular concern about women’s or gay rights.
I believe you speak sincerely, yet your words haven’t convinced me to stop supporting my favorite donut shop. I also don’t have a problem supporting the bean-pie selling Black Muslims, even though the sisters are often decked out in abayas. But perhaps if one of the women in those groups reached out to me personally and let me know they were being victimized, I’d stop patronizing their businesses.
I mean, you will never see me singing the praises of any religion. I think humans will always be stunted as long as we cling to religion, especially traditional ones. But I think focusing on what people wear on their heads oversimplifies a complex issue. Find me a country where women don’t have power and I’ll agree with you that it’s oppressive. But I won’t be looking at what the women are wearing to make that assessment.
You’re joking , right? Just in case you aren’t , it’s for the same reason that you will hear those same people outraged by the idea of using sharia law in arbitration who do not complain about arbitration based on Christian or Jewish rules. It’s because somehow, when Muslims do something , it’s different than when certain types of Christians and Jews do that same thing *
Okay. I don’t boycott such businesses either. I don’t see why these individual women—whether Amish or Muslim—should be punished for being potential victims of the patriarchy.
Because there are no Amish groups attempting to violently take over the world?
I just want to point out that here in southwestern Missouri, the women in traditional head coverings are typically Mennonite. I have known personally one young woman who started dressing almost like a Saudi after she converted to Islam, and one evangelical woman who started wearing a head covering because it was in the Bible. But mostly it’s Mennonites.
And of course there are still parts of the world where a married woman traditionally wears some kind of cover in Christian cultures.
So when I see on Facebook a relative—whom I know for a fact was raised a devout Christian—denouncing hijab, I get pretty upset. That really has been a Christian custom for hundreds of years. You should know better than to attack someone for a custom that’s part of our own tradition.
Of course Christians are not attempting to violently take over the world. They already have, after all.
No, they haven’t. China, which is the most populous nation on earth and third largest by landmass, is not Christian. India, the second most populous nation on earth and seventh largest by landmass, is not Christian. The entire region known colloquially as “the Middle East”, also, is not Christian, or at least not dominated by Christianity - its populations of Orthodox, Maronite, Melkite and other varieties of Christians typically live under persecution.
Christianity has not remotely taken over the world.
OK, so how do you plan to find out? And what will you do about it when you do find out?
Huh. That does not match my experience with South Asian women in N. America.
If you were raised in an abusive religious environment, I am sorry for you.
If you weren’t, bite your tongue. You caricature theism like you were raised by an angry atheist who taught you always to try to pick a fight with the rest of us.
In any case, when you don’t distinguish between custom & oppression, you aren’t being logical. You ignored several posts making this distinction in this thread to yell “Religion bad.” Can you please stop acting juvenile?
The issue is further complicated by the fact that middle-class men in India tend to wear generic “western” clothing of buttoned shirts and slacks in drab colors, whereas middle-class women are more likely to wear the traditional sari or salwar-suit usually in bright colors, though of course some women do wear Tshirts-and-jeans type outfits informally.
So when Indian people move to the US, the men are already in the habit of wearing what we might consider “business casual” or “shirt and slacks”, whereas women’s outfits are more obviously “foreign”-looking.
Are you really wondering if wearing a hijab is oppressive?
It depends on where one is, and what happens if a person who is expected to wear a hijab doesn’t.
Always.
A custom of being told that an angry sky fairy judges your worth of as a human being and how you should be treated in this life and the next based on your headwear.
Here here!!! Women who wear them because of their own free will, due to a personal feeling (the same as one might wear a crucifix or what have you), that’s not oppressive. They also don’t really phase me all that much, since growing up a few of the nuns at our church still wore veils.
Hell, my mother’s family’s from Eastern Europe. If I were to post some of those pictures, the hijab doesn’t really look all that different from those women in those photos in their babushkas! 
Wearing one because you feel society will judge you as a whore, or because you’ll be shamed, or because God will punish you or, because there’s a law against it? That’s oppressive as fuck. (Burqas and niqabs are oppressive no matter what, not to mention a safety hazard.)
And if a women feels oppressed by one, she shouldn’t be forced to wear one, or called an “Islamophobe”*, or told “oh, it’s just the right-wingers saying that!” It’s her choice.
*Yes, I’ve seen that from some idiots. Telling an actual Muslim or former Muslim she’s an Islamophobe. What can you do?
I force myself to get out of bed every morning and deal with stupid. Help, I’m oppressed!
Jesus Christ on a pogo stick, all of your responses have been non-sequiturs, irrelevancies, and gross misrepresentations. When evangelical Christians repeatedly tell women they’re second-class citizens, they shouldn’t say shit about any other religion’s treatment of women, or of how those women CHOOSE TO TREAT THEMSELVES.
India was conquered by the British who violently oppressed its population - they only left when forced to do so. By violent opposition (yeah, yeah, Gandhi. There were lots of peoples with guns besides Gandhi.). And yes, Christianity was invoked back then as a justification for the existence of the Raj (among others).
The Middle East has, of course, long been controlled by the Byzantines who enforced Orthodoxy at the point of a sword. And then there were those crusade thingys which I believe had something to do with Christianity ? I think ? I’m like 80% sure. And then it was conquered again by the British (and the French, further west) who, again, only left when they were kicked out.
China… yeah, China never got conquered. Too many of them, too rich, too large, too powerful even at its weakest. So it got debt-trapped instead. They’ve remembered that one neat trick, BTW.
And of course, one notes how you’ve pointedly avoided talking about an entire continent. The one on the left ?
Yeah, but you wouldn’t be chastized or beaten up for not wearing one whilst in the wider public.
That’s a business setting, in wider society, the woman would be able to do what she wants in terms of what to wear to a large degree.
I find it funny because alot of people are ignorant of the Hijabs function, which is gender policing. Sure, you’ll get people who wear it out of choice, but it’s not really a choice when the penalty for not wearing one is greater than wearing one.