It's not a perfect correlation, but even if you just look in Europe, the countries with more freedom of speech have more civil liberties.
It's also worth noting that only half of the EU member states have legal gay marriage -- something that all Americans have access to.
Feels like this is an attempt to simplify something complex. Most Western European countries have more restrictions on speech than the US, but many of them do a better job of upholding civil rights. Just today someone posted a thread about the broken bail system in the US - for example.