Lake County Divorce Attorneys

Gay parents face uphill custody battles

When Darin Adams met his wife at Brigham Young University, the recently return missionary was attracted to the cultured young Swedish girl who was in the country to get married, or get her education and go back to Europe. The handsome young man took his young bride to the Salt Lake City Temple, had their first two children and lived in Orem. A more picture-perfect Mormon family could not be found in all of Utah.

Or so it appeared.

“I never hid the fact that I was gay from my Mormon leaders. Even before my mission they counseled me to go on a mission, get married and have sex with a woman. My bishop told me that being intimate with a woman would fix everything,” Adams said. “I never told my wife until after we moved to Connecticut.”

While attending BYU, Adams took part in some so-called reparative therapy, and after coming out to his wife, she encouraged him to pursue it again. For a year Adams received weekly counseling from his bishop, saw a therapist and tried to change his sexuality. He read more than a dozen books about changing his sexuality and he worked with online support groups.

It didn’t work.

Although the family had grown with another child, Adams was finally coming to the realization that he would not become straight. He told his wife he was developing feelings for another man and that the marriage wasn’t going to survive.

“My wife told me she was moving to Utah and she was taking the kids. She told me she wouldn’t get divorced in Connecticut. I didn’t try to stop her and for a while I just visited the kids every chance I got, but eventually I knew I had to be near them,” Adams said.

He moved back to Utah County to be near the kids where he began the divorce proceedings.

“Things got very ugly very quickly,” Adams said.

He endured false accusations of prostitution, child abuse and other sexually deviant behaviors, none of which were ever prosecuted. His sexuality was routinely brought up in court evaluations, and his ex-wife tried to maintain full custody of the children.

“The kids started displaying disturbing behavior. It was obvious that their mother was sabotaging them and only God knows what she told them,” Adams said. “They vandalized my home repeatedly, and they just showed behavior that is not normal for kids that are only 12, 10 and 8 years old.”

When it became apparent that she was going to try and take the kids out of the country, Adams knew he had to seek full custody.

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