Nearly everyone in Colorado City, Arizona, and the adjacent town of Hildale, Utah, was a member of a fundamentalist Mormon sect that practices polygamy and had long encouraged multiple marriages between close relatives.

By the late 1990s, Tarby and his team had discovered fumarase deficiency was occurring in the greatest concentration in the world among the fundamentalist Mormon polygamists of northern Arizona and southern Utah.

Of even greater concern was the fact that the recessive gene that triggers the disease was rapidly spreading to thousands of individuals living in the community because of decades of inbreeding.

Fast-forward to the present: About half of the 8,000 people living in the towns are blood relatives of two of the founding families that settled in the 1930s on the desolate high desert plateau against the base of the Vermillion Cliffs.

Religious leaders control all marriages in the community, and many of these relatives have married or likely will marry in the future. Some of these marriages will include parents who both are carriers of the fumarase deficiency gene, making it certain that more children will be afflicted with the disease.

“We have and will have a continual output of children with this condition,” Tarby says.

In this isolated religious society north of the Grand Canyon, few secrets have been more closely guarded than the presence of fumarase deficiency. Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints elders, who control the community, have labored to keep the public from finding out why the disorder is manifesting. Many members of the fundamentalist community don’t even know it’s occurring.

Those who are aware of this problem – parents, family members and such – all look at it as a special challenge from God, meant to test their faith. It gives one the idea that they explain away every possible negative outcome as a ‘test of faith’, which leads me to believe that these folks will breed themselves into sterility and genetic deterioration before they will ever give up their lifestyles.

Sickening, really. Absolutely sickening.

Ten points for the Jainism reference.

I was a Jainist who swatted a fly in the last life.

I was in Hilldale campaigning for a Democratic state senator. His district was larger than Massachusetts and Connecticutt put together. If you find yourself on the wrong side of Lake Powell you can either travel three hundred miles to get on the other side of the district or travel the Arizona Strip for which you go through Hilldale/Colorado City. We also used to have the much more benign Alex Joseph bunch in Big Water.

This is what happens when we take religious edicts from a patriarchal, indigenous 2,000 year old desert culture, and try to make them work in a society that purports itself to be enlightened, democratic, and focused on principles such as reasoned public discourse and individual liberty. The Utilitarians are spinning in their graves.