A Jesuit university is training family therapists by making them watch violent porn.

The moral universe we have lived in for 2,000 years is gone. This is a spiritual emergency.

I am breaking from my usual posting schedule because Monday night I heard what is possibly the most outrageous and depraved story about wokeness in education I’ve encountered yet. Worse than the high school classes about butt plugs. Worse than drag queens reading to kids. Worse than ‘porn literacy’ in schools.

Naomi Epps Best, who recently launched a Substack called Clinically Incorrect, joined The Radical Center/Solid Ground livestream to tell us about her experiences at Santa Clara University in California, where she is a graduate student in marriage and family therapy. She is a 26 year old Christian woman, married with a young child. Santa Clara, a private Jesuit college, is the oldest operating university in California, charges just shy of $60,000 in tuition for undergrad, and has an endowment of over $1.5 billion dollars. It’s motto is “Ad maiorem Dei gloriam” — which Google tells me translates as “for the greater glory of God.”

One of Best’s course requirements for her graduate degree was to complete a class in human sexuality. Makes sense, right? Good to have an academic grounding on that primal and mysterious force that drives so much human behaviour.

What she got, instead, was borderline sexually assaulted. Not in body, but in mind. I’m going to put a trigger warning on what I am about to say here. It is not for the faint of heart.

The course, Best said, included watching a video of a woman being gang-banged as a punishment. Watching a video of a woman be ball-gagged, flogged and a knife dragged across her throat in a “sex dungeon.”

Being given an assignment in which students were asked to anonymously critique their own genitals (?!?!), and then other students would read out said critiques to the class.

Being made to write an 8 to 10 page paper on her “sexual autobiography” — in which it was stipulated that students should include the age at which they started masturbating, what their current sex life was like, and their “erotic goals.” This piece of work was “the final exam” for the compulsory course.

And one of the books Best said was on the course list has repeated casual references to animals: a warning that a certain kind of lube is fatal to horses and cows; and the line “a man’s sexual orientation results from what causes him the greatest sexual arousal, what kind of person (or animal or thing) gives him the most intense excitement.”

When Best pushed back on the invasive and inappropriate curriculum, she was treated with contempt by the faculty. She even went to the campus ministry where she was simply told by a priest to pray about it, no advocacy on her behalf.

At this point, even just writing this, my mind is spinning. Am I being pranked? Am I dreaming this? How am I suddenly living in a world where being sexually attracted to animals is just a passing, non-judgmental, reference in a book about human wellbeing? Where students are being forced to disclose their masturbation habits, for credit? At a Jesuit university?

The other counselling professionals on Monday’s livestream had similar stories. Leslie’s training included being told that if the client is ok with a behaviour, then the therapist’s role was to affirm— even when, as Leslie’s professor recounted, a client is engaging in scat porn. “Her whole message was, don’t laugh. You have to be able to be supportive,” Leslie said in the livestream.

Similarly, Christine Sefein, who is a regular on the Solid Ground livestream and is a former professor of clinical psychology, said that she was once asked to teach a course on human sexuality that barred the discussion of male heterosexuality.

I am not being hyperbolic when I say, this is a spiritual emergency. The moral universe that humans in the west have lived in for about 2,000 years is gone — trampled and beaten down by a secularism that for the first few decades of my life seemed benign, even enlightened.

ALL the cultural gatekeepers are now compromised, as far as I can tell. The best case scenario is that the people engaging in outrageous behaviours are simply callow fools doing it for shock value. But even if that is the case, empty transgression and boundary shattering is BAD FOR SOCIETY. It creates delusion, misery, and breaks the minds of children. The worst case is that all our institutions have been infiltrated by demons. Whether literal or metaphorical, that we must all decide for ourselves.

Everything from Glasgow street theatre to a Jesuit college’s therapy postgraduate course in California, to children’s books in the Republic of Ireland. This moral rot needs to be addressed.