magine with me that you are a devout member of the LDS church. You're in a leadership position in the ward and have the missionary opportunity to work hard with a brother, bringing him back into activity. He's someone who is a good friend to many of your leaders and you gain a lot of recognition by helping him find the church again. You resist that of course, trying instead to focus on the missionary work and your hopes for his salvation. As his inactivity fades, he is called into priesthood callings, and eventually sealed to his wife in the temple.

Now set that exciting and successful effort to one side and imagine one of your beautiful daughters at age 8, innocent and sweet (of course she's a normal child, with her struggles and the particular challenges she poses to you as a parent, but if you step back from that looking at the bigger picture, she's really a good kid). Imagine that this long-inactive man is assigned to your home as your home teacher. You notice that he likes to pull your girls onto his lap where he gives them candy. He seems like a nice old man, very gentle.

Imagine that during this time, totally out of your awareness, this newly activated brother catches your daughter alone. He takes her to a lonely place. He's big and gruff with her, scaring her. He tells her to take her clothes off and then kisses her and touches her in sacred places, defiling her in her own eyes. When he's done he threatens your daughter to never tell. Having been taught to be obedient to the priesthood, she complies.

Years later as your daughter begins developing into a woman she becomes unusually moody and depressed. You love her. You try to talk to her. It's as though she hates you, wants nothing to do with you (you are a man, also an active priesthood holder, you should have protected her, but she doesn't know how to put any of this into words. She only knows she hates herself and her womanhood. She decides she's a lesbian and will never marry, but that goes against everything that has meaning in her limited world. She's a good kid. She had God torn away from her when He did not protect her. Where does she turn? What can she do?).

One morning when she doesn't go to school and you see her light on under her door, you go gently, knowing that things are rough for her right now. You knock, call her name. She doesn't answer.

You turn the handle. You open the door, calling her name one more time (the very last time). It isn't just her room you are entering. You are also entering a darkness, that after the shock and horror wears off, will engulf you for many years. You will not be able to sleep easily any more. Life will not seem worth living for a time. There is an enigma: you feel like lying down and staring at the wall, yet you have the responsibility of other children, business, career and all the obligations connected to these. Although it is more than you can reasonably bear, if you can step back into the harness, it will also be your salvation. Doing, not Being.

Satan has you in his cruel grasp of helplessness. You try to rebel against a reality you cannot accept. Until you do, the only peace you feel is for a moment, after waking (as the healing of time passes, one of those ever-more frequent moments when you sleep dreamlessly). Because you don't yet remember the nightmare you are living.

Imagine that even though it doesn't seem possible at first, you realize you're going to survive the suicide death of your daughter. Your oldest daughter who will never graduate from High School, won't get married in the temple to a fine young man, won't have children of her own, won't love you and be there to give you joy as you grow older. You find that even though it's painful, it also is helpful to talk to friends, even old ones from your Ward down in Provo where your daughter was molested so many years ago. You don't know yet that this suicide is enmeshed deeply with that molestation.

As you talk, imagine your astonishment to find that other friends who were in the Provo ward with you at that time had daughters who were also molested by this man. What if you found out that your Stake President was aware of what this man was doing to little girls and took no action against him? In fact, having been told by the President what he was capable of, your Bishop assigned him to home teach in your home, with your young daughters, without giving you a hint about this dark side of him?

Let's assume that even before you knew about the molestation perpetrated by this evil man, that you had been interested in why some young people were being sexually molested in the Church. You got involved in volunteer work and as other members found that you were sympathetic, they began to confide in you about situations you found difficult to believe at first. You began to learn that this sort of protective nonsense was going on consistently throughout the church.

After the death of your daughter, time passes and you realize something must be done about this. You try to contact the brethren and talk to them about these problems assuming they just aren't aware. In response to your heart-broken letters, they either ignore you or send you form letters that have no relationship to your questions and comments.

You become aware that instead of a lack of awareness, what the leaders from the head of the church down to the local level suffer from appears to be arrogance. They want to be unquestioned. Their arrogance allows them to decide for you and the other members what is best, without telling you important things that might help you come to your own independent conclusion.

You decide that the brethren need to start learning to take some responsibility for the consequences of the illicit power they give to men they know are too weak to handle it. (See section 121) After many one-sided efforts to communicate, you realize the church is protecting abusive persons, not intentionally, but out of the ignorance nurtured by their arrogance.

Obviously this exercise is real. Tragically, it not only happened to me, but in various diverse ways has happened, and is currently happening to many other people in the church. If you are devout in the church, it could happen to you.

As you participated in the exercise with me, how did you feel? Did you feel protected by the leadership? Did you feel they had the best interests of your daughter in mind? Did you feel like they cared about you as a spiritually vulnerable human being caught in a horrible circumstance where something very wrong had happened under their watch?

In a microcosm of what is happening in the greater church, over the years since my daughter's death, I slowly learned about all the secrets kept faithfully by those who created an environment that made it easy for a child molester to have access to my daughter.

I know the church doesn't want people to believe that it has any responsibility whatsoever for the high levels of abuse and suicide among church members. In contrast, I believe it needs to take full responsibility for encouraging attitudes that create an environment ripe for domination and subjugation, where abuse is likely to occur. I resisted believing that for many years despite growing evidence of it. At first, it seemed to me that one would have to condemn the church as a totally evil organization if one were to accept the truth of these cover-ups and artificial environments where abuse thrives.

I realize now that the leaders of the LDS church are generally "good" men, who have fooled themselves into thinking they have more inspiration than the members. The normal give-and-take of a healthy Christ-like relationship is based on equality, unconditional love, openness and willingness to consider criticism, just like Peter took it from Paul. But the brethren apparently think they need not allow persons like me to explain to them why the death of my daughter was unnecessary. Because they have the delusion that whatever they say and do (or don't do) is God's will, they inadvertently offend our little ones and consent to the death and abuse of thousands of victims in the church, child and adult alike.

That seems evil, I admit, but it is based in ignorance and can be resolved if they can be made to learn. Christ talked about how difficult it is to teach the arrogant, and in fact they killed Him for trying. Still, when Christ was teaching the people, he told them their righteousness had to exceed that of the Pharisees and Scribes. That implies there was good among these arrogant individuals, and it is no different when considering the brethren and what is done generally in the church. Good things happen there. Many people who need direction are helped by the church.

However, some people are hurt by their lack of empathy. I wish they would humbly read the story above.

It reminds me of my last temple recommend interview less than a year after the death of my daughter. I had rejected home teaching because of how dangerous it now seemed to me. I had already gotten the consent of the bishop for the recommend, and now I sat before the Stake Presidency. This man condescendingly asked "an extra" temple recommend question of all the saints who came to beg him for admission to the temple. It was, "Are you a faithful home teacher." I told him I wasn't. He was shocked and asked me why. I told him because of the artificial trust required in the home teaching relationship, my daughter had been molested and ultimately had committed suicide, very recently. He paused, mouth open. I waited, assuming he would feel compassion and concern. Instead, he said something like, "The home teaching program of the church is a wonderful instrument of God. You need to look at the big picture. Don't let an insignificant problem like this deter your faithfulness."

He had no empathy. It is my prayer, that these comments instill in you the compassion needed to believe the unnecessary death of any child is significant.


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