Stephan:   Utah is the closest thing we have in America to an essentially open Theocracy. That makes the state particularly interesting in the sense Justice Louis Brandeis described the states as laboratories to test social policies.Utah lets us assess the social outcomes arising from religious fundamentalism, in this case the de facto state religion of Utah, Mormonism. The three universals of fundamentalism, of whatever religion are:

1. A strong sense of entitlement and self-righteousness
2. A heightened sense of persecution
3. Sexual dysfunctionality centering on an obsessive need for males to be dominate, and their need to control a woman's body and sexuality.

These characteristics are universally justified in the context of religion, independent of any particular religious belief.  In Utah that means the Mormons, who I find particularly interesting because their founders, and Joseph Smith particularly, maintained a "Christian" form of the Muslim harem. The church itself acknowledges Smith had 40 wives, some of them married to other men whose husbands he drove off if they did not acquiesce, and one only 14 years old. Women at one point were referred to as "heifers." Polygamy is gone now, except for fringe LDS groups, it has morphed into strict heterosexual fundamentalist monogamy. Which has left a percentage of LDS males and females, those who make up the LGBT community, locked in the closet. This report focuses on suicide as a specific social outcome in the context Mormonism arising from these repressive policies. Begin with this: Utah is the state with the highest anti-depressant usage, and the leading state in porn usage, where the most popular search terms are "lesbian" and "shemale" and there is an actual category known as "Mormon porn" involving sacred underwear. Taken all together, Utah's social profile on sexual gender issues, based on outcome data, is pretty clear. I think the neuroscience tells us that this fundamentalist sexual/gender attitude is a form of mental illness, protected because it is cloaked in religion. And it is absolutely clear that fundamentalism works to degrade wellness. This report is an example of this principle produced by the Utah laboratory.