Jim Cecropia wrote:
I don't know. My experience seems to suggest that Americans are fairy ignorant of other nation's restrictive laws, giving rise to the belief that other nations are uniformly at least as liberal or more liberal than the U.S.
Oh, really? ... My impression was rather that Americans tend to think of their own country as being the most liberal and most "humane" on the planet. It would seem plausible, as most of the time they hear about situations in other nations, it's in the news when some oppressive regime (perhaps tinted with a condemning remark on communism) is mentioned as having done something that would be unthinkable in the US.