At age 28, I was living all the church rules, was still a virgin (and not from lack of opportunity), and life was going well for me. I met a girl at a church dance who while getting to know her, I found out she had been excommunicated twice before, and was then a member again. Stupid me, I said that old line to myself that if god could forgive her then so should I. After being romantically involved for several months and believing that she really loved me and was my friend, we had sex. I really fell hard for her too. Shortly afterward, she lost interest in me. I found out from friends that she was having sex with as many of my friends as she could. She had traveled accross the country from where she lived, and moved in to the apartment right next to mine while we had been involved. After the relationship ended (I wasn't the one who wanted to end it), I could hear her at night through my bedroom wall, having sex with various guys that came around. Some from my (supposed) circle of returned missionary friends, and some were strangers. It was a very painful time for me. Everyone seemed to want to get theirs while the gettin' was good from her. The shit really hit the fan when I started telling people's Bishops what they were doing. And she got pregnent. She hooked up quickly with one of these guys and everyone else denied everything. One guy in perticular sat accross from me in a meeting with the Bishop, looking the Bishop in the eyes and said "I could look my savior in the eyes and honestly say that what he (me) is saying is not true". But he accidentally spooked himself and broke a few seconds later with a horrified look on his face (totally busted). A few nights before that meeting he had stood at my door screaming repeatedly in out-of-control redfaced anger "you can't tell on me. I'll repent when I'm ready to repent but you can't tell on me". Now my ex-girlfriend was pregnent with a child that could be mine, could be a lot of other people's also. She (an un-dowed member) was excommunicated. The slimebag ex-friend who started doing her almost immediately after meeting her was a returned missionary as was I. Both he and I were only dis-fellowshipped. I guess there's no difference what so ever between falling in love and making a mistake and f...ing your friend's girlfriend the first chance you get. Most of the other guys scattered like rats. She and her new boyfriend moved back to her home town (where I grew up also). When I approached her Bishop there he met with me and basically told me to go away. He demanded in an angry voice that I just forgive, and told me that I had built my house on a foundation of sand. I told him that I didn't want the girl anymore, just to know whether or not I was a father. He repeatedly accused me of trying to break up their marriage (that he had hastily slapped together months before), so that I could get her back in to a relationship with myself. I assured him that was not the case. Through a long chain of church leaders (some mine, some theirs), I heard every imaginable excuse for why I should go away and just forget about it. Not one of them understood my concern over potentially being a father to a child who has a sociopath mother and a sneaky ex-friend who had started f-ing his friend's girlfriend the first chance he got, as a supposed father. There had been violence in her first marriage and after the cuckolding I had been put through, I was pretty confident that their marriage wouldn't last and that sooner or later, there would be more violence in her home. One of these Bishops laughed and said to me "it looks like you're off the hook". Another said "someone might just pop you in the nose next time they see you". I had to honestly wonder how many of these Bishops and Stake Presidents might have illegitimate children themselves out there that they didn't want to know about or didn't want others knowing about either. They certainly couldn't understand where I was coming from. For all purposes, I was treated like a guy who had had an affair with a married woman. The way I saw things, I was the only legitimate person who had been involved with her, married or not. After making good on my promise to file a paternity suit myself, I called their Bishop and said "I'll be bringing a police officer to your sacrament meeting this sunday. And if we have to serve the paternity papers in the chapel right before the start of the sacrament meeting, that's what we're going to do." I was really prepared to follow through also. So this Bishop who had slapped together this frankenstein marriage of theirs ended up arranging for the process server to serve the papers to them as a means to keep the police out of his chapel on Sunday. Blood testing of all people involved showed that the child wasn't mine, wasn't the son of the guy she had married either. The kid will probably never have a chance to meet his real dad. If they had worked with me, a close friend of mine who was a medical doctor could have (with their permission) accessed medical records and resolved my worries without requiring a court order. As it was, the father/child relationship in that family had been legally severed by the paternity suit and the blood test evidence. You see, instead of "saving the transgressors" (a stated goal of the church in these matters), preserving each person's good mormon image (true or false) was put right to the top of the list. As you can see here, the churche's goal to "protect the good image of the church" fails miserably also. And what about "Protecting the Innocent"? Well, it looks like that fell to the bottom of the list also, unless you consider legally severing a parent child relationship through a court action to be a good thing. Having loved her and really not wanting to harm her family, I agonized for a year and a half, to the point of clinical depression (until right before the statute of limitations for the paternity suit would have expired), before deciding to do what I thought was the right thing. How many potential fathers would abandon their possible offspring to such a f...ed up belief system and parents to raise them? I had tried to prevent this from happening by working through the church instead of through the courts. When all was said and done, I told myself "Thank god for the courts of law, and to hell with the mormon church"! I had my name removed from their records and haven't been back since. It's been twenty-two years since then and I've never been happier. For those of you who taught the six steps of repentance on your missions, you can also see by my story that the real steps to repentance that are practiced and promoted by church leaders are quite different. This religion is an absolute cult. That Handbook 1 of theirs needs some serious revisions also.