Everything's an Imposition!

Literally, everything. On everyone. Everything is an imposition on everyone. At least, that's the logical conclusion of the logic by which religious conservatives like to claim that various liberal secular policies, like gay marriage or widespread contraceptive use, constitute an imposition on them which is contrary to their religious liberty. As I understand it, this argument makes heavy use of the notion that by, say, performing gay marriages, the government imposes on these people the burden of living in a society featuring married gay people. (Okay, sometimes they also like to hyperventilate about the idea that their churches might be forced to gay-marry people, but since they're never placated when it's pointed out that this is just not true...) But that construction quite literally has no limits whatsoever. Once we accept the idea that living in a society where X happens is an imposition or an infringement, those concepts explode across all of existence.

Because any time I do something, anything at all, I impose on you the fact that you're living in a world where I just did the thing I did. And there's nothing you can do about it! I don't ask your permission, and unless you're one of the very few people within a short radius of my current location you don't have the power to stop me. I simply act, and in acting force you to inhabit a reality in which my action occurred. So any time I do anything, or any time anyone else does anything, it's an imposition on everyone. And not just on everyone in the country. Not even just on everyone on the planet! Though I don't know it, I am forced to live in a reality that includes all the actions of any other life forms there may be scattered throughout the universe. And I am forced to live in a reality that includes all the actions of any life forms that may have existed, anywhere in the universe, prior to the present. That means that anytime I act, I impose the fact of my action on everyone everywhere in the universe, from now to eternity. That's a lot of people!

It goes farther than that, I think. Because notice that I'm not constrained by the flow of information here: I live in a reality which contains actions I don't know about. And because information isn't particularly important here, there's no reason to obey things like relativity. I wouldn't say, for instance, that I haven't imposed my action on the Sun People (if they existed, which I assume they don't) until 8 minutes after I act, that being the minimum time required for them to receive information of my action. But if I don't have to wait for the information to arrive before I can start imposing on people, why should I not get to impose on people in the past? They were, after all, living in a reality that contained my action; they were just at a different, and earlier, point in time. That does mean they can't know they inhabit the same reality as my action, but it doesn't mean they don't so inhabit. And while knowledge of the imposition is presumably prerequisite for complaining about the imposition, it would seem not to be necessary for the imposition itself.

So there you go. If we accept the idea that allowing other people who happen to be gay to get married constitutes an imposition on religious conservatives who wish that didn't happen, then we must accept that everything anyone ever does is an imposition on everyone everywhere in the universe who ever lived or ever will. Every action is then an infringement of the rights of everyone throughout all of time and space who wishes that action hadn't happened, or would so wish if they knew about it.

Actually, when you put it that way, maybe this is a pretty good argument, if just for the timey-wimeyness!


On a slightly more serious note, I actually do believe that, when impositions and infringements are legitimate, they can run backwards through time, in certain instances. This strikes me as the best case for criminalizing necrophilia, and general defiling of the dead. While alive, people have robust rights against any attack on their body of which they do not approve, especially attacks of a sexual nature. Most people would find extremely unsettling the idea of their being necrophiled. Therefore, a world in which it is known that necrophilia occurs and is allowed will cause those individuals to have the sense of sexual violation while they are still alive, in anticipating the occurrence of such violation after their death. So the violation actually travels backwards through time, by means of its own anticipation in the statistically-aggregated abstract. Okay, that was only a slightly more serious note.