If a government has a plan to foster neglected children, the first to be disqualified from the potential caretakers would be pedophiles. But in the 1960s, the German government had financed a program, overseen by a renowned psychologist, which placed neglected children in foster care under pedophiles. Shocking, nearly unbelievable, but true, and the subject of a long report in the New Yorker. It reframes the debate on sexual norms in rather unusual terms – of the Left-Right culture wars.

The New Yorker story:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/07/26/the-german-experiment-that-placed-foster-children-with-pedophiles

Progressives are usually permissive on a range of issues (think of free speech), whereas conservatives can be relied upon to favor regulations (like father talking to a child). However, when it comes to sex, things are not so clear cut. Both have gone from one extreme to another, changing places.

The story, by Rachel Aviv, places the “harrowing” program in the cultural context of the 1960s-70s: Sexual Revolution, freedom, the slogan of May 1968: “It is forbidden to forbid.” Aviv shows how the logic of this new culture made the experiment entirely plausible.

The new thinking among progressive circles back then was sexual restrictions led to neurosis, but liberation helped achieve wholeness. Restrictions were the norm under fascism, so the new generation tilted to the other extreme. If sexual taboos shaped the men who oversaw Auschwitz, then removing all taboos would lead us to paradise on earth, they thought.

That belief was behind a petition by some progressive French intellectuals to decriminalize pedophilia. And that belief was also behind the German psychologist and education reformer Helmut Kentler’s bold idea that sex with one’s foster children could be a form of love and care.

And then the revolution got over, and the Left started embracing new taboos within permissiveness. “That today the readers of an impeccably progressive magazine recoil in horror from that extreme [reported in the story] is, among other things, proof that revolutions don’t move in one direction — you can climb back up a slippery slope, you can break a taboo and partially rebuild it,” argues Ross Douthat. In this thought-provoking column, he analyzes the German experiment against its political background:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/24/opinion/sunday/cultural-progressivism-sex-regulate.html