Whistleblower exposes forced sexual rituals at Catholic university

Naomi Epps Best is a Christian graduate student at Santa Clara University studying family and marriage counseling — and what she was forced to partake in was so inappropriate that she wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed sounding the alarm about her experience.

“One of the final classes I have to do to graduate is called human sexuality, and that is a requirement for marriage and family therapists in California,” Best tells BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey on “Relatable.”

“But when I first enrolled in this course in summer of 2024, I dug into the syllabus, and I was shocked by the sexual ethic that was being not just presented but promoted. I immediately discovered sadomasochistic erotica,” she explains.

Sadomasochism is when people derive pleasure from inflicting pain on another person, or when people derive pleasure from being hurt.

When Best was forced to read an erotic story that went into disturbing detail as an example of this subject, she was told that it was “an inoculation to sexual content that we might one day come across.”

Even worse, Best was put into a group of four people, including a man, and they were told to “discuss their masturbation.”

“I said no,” she tells Stuckey. “Also in that class, the final exam was an 8-to-10-page comprehensive sexual autobiography. So they were asking us to answer questions like, ‘When did we first start masturbating?,’ ‘What are key sexual moments in our history?,’ ‘Detail our sexual past,’ and ‘What are our erotic goals for the future, and how will we achieve those?’”

“So, when I read that, I said, ‘I’m not writing my sexual inventory for anybody to read.’ So I tried to get an accommodation, and I was denied. The chair said that this requirement has been in place since the 1980s,” Best explains, noting that it’s a violation of the American Psychological Association’s ethical codes.

“As well, there was a pornographic illustration guide that was openly hostile to the Christian faith. It was written, quote, ‘as revenge for my Catholic upbringing,’” she continues. “There were just crude illustrations of all sorts of sex acts with however many number of people, and I didn’t want to read that. I think that it is probably illegal to force me to consume pornography.”

Not only was Best disturbed by the content, but she confirms to Stuckey that it was “purposefully titillating” material.

“So it was supposed to be turning people on,” Stuckey says, disgusted. “I mean, this is what pornography does — it rewires your brain to desire certain things.”

“I mean, the teachers just sound like perverts, and they’re forcing their students to play along in their fetishes. That’s what it sounds like,” she adds.

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