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Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I'm your host, John DeLin. It is November 7, 2017.

We are beginning a mini series on inappropriate interviews about sexuality with Mormon leadership.

Sam Young, who is known by many in the Mormon Stories Circle, did a recent interview on Mormon Stories probably a year ago.

He started a petition that has over a thousand signatures calling on the Mormon Church to cease any interview with youth.

I would even say adults that is inappropriate in terms of how it discusses things like masturbation and sexuality.

I put out a call recently to ask people to share their stories of inappropriate interviews with bishops and mission presidents and state presidents.

And I've gotten flooded with people telling really horrific stories.

And so what I want to do is just feature a bunch of those stories. They're not going to be multi-hour interviews.

I'm expecting them to be shorter interviews, but each one is going to just tell different stories of Mormon Church leaders asking kind of egregious inappropriate questions in related to sexuality so that we can help encourage the Mormon Church to stop this practice, the damages so many youth.

So today for our interview, we have with us Paul Van Orden, who is courageously volunteered to be the first to tell his story.

So Paul Van Orden, welcome to Mormon Stories Podcast.

Thanks for having me, John.

All right, so we're not going to be digging deeply into your story.

But why don't we just start? Tell us just a tiny bit about your upbringing in the church maybe before we jump into your experience with the interviews.

Border Raids of the Church, my dad's side joined the church back in New York, Navu time. So they've been came across the plains.

My mom's parents, one came from Germany, one came from Ireland, met at a church function, and again, my whole family on both sides, one raised in the church, did the whole thing growing up, 12 years old, eight years old baptism raised.

I went on a mission to the MTC at least, then came home, that's a whole, whole another story.

And then, but got married in the temple, had two kids. And then about eight years ago when I started my faith journey and stepped away a year or two after that.

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