I believe that eating animals is a great evil because of the suffering that it causes to animals. If I tell people this, usually after obnoxiously asking me why I am a vegetarian, they often get offended because they feel that I am "forcing" my opinion on them but in fact I'm just telling it like it is and if they don't like my opinion they shouldn't have asked for it in the first place. But here is what really gets my goat, the whole idea that some people have that being a vegetarian is just a matter of opinion and that since we live in a "free society" somehow that means that we should tolerate a lifestyle predicated on cruelty to animals. According to that way of thinking if the majority of voters agree that meat eating is permissible then nobody has a right to force them to not eat meat. And to me that just seems absolutely ludicrous. We can live in a "free" society all we want but a free society still needs some kind of constitutional backbone that ensures some basic ideals are held sacred or else all you have is the whims and tyrannies of the individual members of that state. I means certainly the idea of not torturing animals because you think they are tasty is something that everyone should hold sacred and if you don't think so then I say too bad. So okay, I imagine most of you who are meat eaters are probably not going to buy this line of thinking and of course most of what I am saying could equally apply to other issues such as abortion. However doesn't the idea of democracy with it's emphasis on tolerance in some ways paradoxically intolerant to those moral beliefs which aren't tolerant but are in the minority?