He said that it is a moral dilemma whether to forgive people who have committed heinous crimes, and thus, “each person must offer or deny forgiveness based on their own moral convictions.”

“I can understand a serial killer, but that doesn’t excuse the deed,” he added.

Indeed, because so many people are drawn to terror groups precisely because they feel misunderstood, one way to stop them might be to finally try to understand them.

Overt social exclusion also leaves a terrible mark on people who break gender norms. Supporters of the bathroom bills often portrayed the measures as a way to protect innocents from trans people, who, they seemed to believe, preyed on unsuspecting girls and women in their most private moments.209 But the people who need protection when it comes to bathrooms might be trans people themselves. Transgender people who have been denied access to gender-appropriate bathrooms or other facilities have a higher risk of suicide than those who haven’t, a 2016 study found.210 And that’s on top of the already astonishingly high rate of suicide attempts among young trans people—around 35 percent, in some studies. What’s more, in 2013,212 54 percent of transgender respondents in a survey reported experiencing health issues from avoiding using public restrooms, including dehydration, kidney infections, and urinary tract infections.

Here’s how one transgender woman described the act of using the bathroom to a group of researchers writing in the journal Transgender Health in 2016:213

Then of course there are always restrooms, which are, let’s call them, “nightmarish,” for lack of a nicer term. I do everything possible to avoid using the restroom in public. Going into the bathroom, you’re always worried that someone’s gonna harass you or call you out about something, or say something mean or attack you, or do some other horrible thing.

The increased suicide risk among transgender people occurs, the researcher Kristie Seelman wrote, because of “minority stress,” or the strain that marginalized groups face because of society’s constant, low-level poor treatment.

In addition to racial minorities, there’s especially strong scientific evidence that minority stress affects LGBT people, whose very identities are at the center of so many culture wars.

Here is how minority stress plays out: compared to straight people,214 gay, lesbian, and bisexual individuals are more likely to need treatment for anxiety or to take antidepressants. Another paper215 published in 2016 found that gay men who had been insulted, felt ashamed, or felt rejected because of their homosexuality were more likely to develop mental-health problems. In that study, the men were not, necessarily, being called slurs or kept from dating people of their preferred gender. One measure simply asked whether they’d ever been avoided in locker rooms or mistreated by doctors. The implication is that even small incidents have the potential to send people into an anguished vortex: Is it because I’m gay?