I’m so glad Stephy said “growing dongs in petri dish”. It never ceases to delight me!

Simone, you are wonderfully put together. You look like you could have walked off the Mad Men set.

Dongs from a petri dish, definitely an advance from the dong erector set I had as a kid (and more “uplifting” too).

Mormonism. Their name says it all. Only one letter evolved from moronism.

Thanks for the great show, ya’ll are a riot.

Mormonism: what a great subject to tackle. I can vouch for the weirdness of it in general, and totally believe the statistics that Stephy mentioned about antidepressants and pornography. A old buddy of mine is now married to a former Utah Mormon woman. In only a couple of years of marriage, he has caught her younger 18-year-old brother sleeping with his 13-year-old daughter from a previous marriage (well, making every attempt to, anyway) and found that his wife very likely suffered from sexual abuse in the home and has some serious sexual issues in their marriage as a result.

My brother used to witness at the Mormon Temple in Mesa, AZ during the holidays when they had huge events there and I heard a lot of weird things about Mormonism as a result of his studying up and interactions. Mostly, I would say that it is very important in Mormonism to ‘fit the mold’ and have good outward appearances. Because of this, the repressed human tensions are manifested in sometimes creepy, unhealthy, immoral and even illegal ways, and there is massive cultural pressure to hide it in the seedy, unseen subculture of the religion. I’m no fan of religion in general, but these ones are especially wacky. As Simone pointed out, we’re fortunate that the history of the religion is relatively short so that the shadiness of how it has developed is easily unearthed. On the racism issue, the President of the LDS Church didn’t just have a conveniently-timed revelation about the church’s treatment of black people because of the civil rights movement. They were also proselytizing countries in Central and South America, and needed their message to resonate and spread. For all of its’ faults, the LDS church has a very respectable advertising and growth strategy cooked in, with all the pressure on kids to all do a mission right out of high school on their own dime.