So onto another topic where I have issues, the entitlement to have opinions.

The main issue I have with letting people have their opinions, is that there's a line between letting them have opinions, and letting them force their opinions down everyone else's throats. It's like the question of how much a tolerant society should tolerate intolerance- if there's no onus on the intolerant to let people have their opinions, on the grounds that they're entitled to the opinion that nobody should be allowed an opinion but them, then what happens is that the intolerant people force their views on everyone else.

There are circumstances where opinions are highly likely to be forced down people's throats. For instance, when people are debating laws and rules, or making committal decisions that impact upon others, by definition, a decision will often involve imposing an opinion on others. Or, when "opinions" are just beliefs that are widely accepted without question, whereupon many people will impose those beliefs on others without thinking, because they're accepted as givens. For instance, very few unjust laws or social norms are overturned by people just "letting their followers have their opinions". As an extreme case of where entitlement to opinions can be mutually exclusive, if someone's opinion is that it's okay to murder people, unless we suppress the person's opinion, the person will murder someone, thus imposing their opinion on others.

There are all kinds of issues surrounding this. For instance, in environmental policy, it's increasingly widely accepted among environmentalists that the only way to solve global warming is to marginalise and alienate motorists, hoping to deter them from driving by making driving worse than the alternatives. If I try to challenge that view- even just with the purpose of making it known that other, potentially legitimate, opinions on the issue exist, I often get told, "let them have their opinions". Of course, if everybody just "lets them have their opinions", their opinions will be imposed on everyone through incremental changes in legislation. Then the hypocrites can come out with "yeah, but people force their opinions on others and that's life". So let's see now, I have to let others have their opinions, but have to accept it as a fact of life that their opinions will be forced on me?

Tolerance is a great thing, but just as with freedom, it has self-limiting points- if we are too tolerant of the intolerant, the intolerant will force their views on others, by definition making the society less tolerant.