The U.S. has a somewhat different take from much of the world on several civil liberties issues, including freedom of speech and freedom of religion. As an American I'm quite proud of that fact.
Proudness is quite an unimportant emotion when the betterment of human society is at stake. In fact, there are tons of examples where proudness leads to blindness (most probably close to 100% of the time). I personally explicitly try not to be proud of anything to avoid any oversight.
Anyways, its interesting to see how people frequently forget about progress and hold on to old ideas. They forget the importance of continuously fixing problems. They also forget that usually the solution to a problem is usually the simplest one (especially one that's been proven).
