“**I have heard that Iran was not at all this way until the rise of Khomeini in 1979.”
Pretty much. It was reaction against the Shah’s attempts to de-barbarize Iran that fueled Khomeini’s rise. Prior to the revolution Iran had become quite modern.
It was easy for opponents to point to American culture as decadent with legalized abortion, no-fault divorce and such; today it is even easier with “gay marriage” and transgender acting normalized.
While it is easy to mock these primitives, they are inheriting the Earth while the West recedes.