Becoming an American citizen 10 years ago was one of the most exciting and proud days in my life. It was not simply because I had fled Iran – the country of my birth – where, after becoming a Christian in 1999, I was arrested and sentenced to death for the “crime” of apostasy. Indeed, the ability to live as a Christian without daily fears of arrest or persecution, much less torture and death, was life-changing. I was also able to vote in a free and democratic election for the first time in my life. It’s impossible for most Americans to imagine not having the freedoms so cherished for us all– and for which Iranians are struggling and dying to gain their freedom from the oppression of the Islamic Republic – and being so foreign and unimaginable for me just years earlier as I sat on death row in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison.

Often, as an American who was able to flee tyranny, I feel that I cherish America’s freedoms more than those who were born here and take them for granted. I understand more than most what lack of freedom looks like in an entire country, and for the citizens living under the oppression of Islamic Sharia law.

I don’t dismiss the things that are talking points of American elections, not at all. But for so many Americans living with the freedoms that we have, far too many do not appreciate what they mean. When it comes to women’s rights, of course I stand for that in the American way of thinking. But sometimes I shake my head because I know what it’s really like to live in a society in which misogyny and subjugation of women is in its DNA. I know what it’s like to see women manipulated to become sex workers under the guise of a perverse and institutionally sanctioned Islamic formula of “temporary marriage.”

I know what it’s like to fear being beaten or abused because of not wearing the mandatory........

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