Irans government is pretty backwards. The Iranian society is and was much more open a few decades ago. Truly a sad story of development in the completely wrong direction.
Have you seen the US lately? We're en route to undoing Roe v Wade, the Civil Rights Act, years of progress on other matters, etc, and we've already basically given up on functional democracy by allowing corporations to spend as much as they want on candidates. What do they say about those in glass houses...?
In the US the backlash is unfortunate but explainable. While conservatives could probably have been convinced with data that liberation did in fact not increase abortion cases and showing that prohibition doesn't stop them either while just increasing suffering, a lot of liberal proponents put some twitter nut jobs at the forefront of the discussion. Or maybe conservative media just put them in the spotlight. That is my impression at least. The result is predictably bad. I don't know how that abortion topic came up in the first place, but here we are.
Money in politics is a serious problem. Obama was very honest about that. While basically being bankrolled by citybank, he made that fact clear multiple times and basically asked for people holding their representatives accountable. Obviously that doesn't seem so easy.
But all that doesn't really compare to the theocratic rules the Iranian regime implemented. That is on a whole other level.