But the past is another country, and Aviv explains with bracing clarity how the context of the 1960s and 1970s made the experiment entirely plausible. It seems almost impossible that this really happened. Concerning Kentler’s work, Douthat notes: On the moral and cultural left, sexual liberation helps citizens to escape the chains of the nasty old faiths. The unstated theme running through this stunning New Yorker piece is that the Sexual Revolution has become part of a new civil religion. This raises journalism questions, methinks. This was not a religious conviction - other than the fact that it was seen as a way of attacking traditional religions. The man at the center of this horror story is Helmut Kentler, a Sexual Revolution hero in post-World War II Germany who sincerely believed, for reasons personal and professional, that it would be a good thing for the government to fund experiments in which lonely, abandoned children were placed in the homes of male pedophiles. If readers do a few quick searches through the text, they will find no references to words such as “religion,” “faith,” “church” or “Bible.” The word “morality” shows up, but only in a negative context.
![the suicide of rachel foster pedophilia the suicide of rachel foster pedophilia](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/yDZRw5M7Vs8/maxresdefault.jpg)
That is certainly the case with a recent Rachel Aviv feature at The New Yorker than ran with this headline: “ The German Experiment That Placed Foster Children with Pedophiles.”
![the suicide of rachel foster pedophilia the suicide of rachel foster pedophilia](http://yoninetanyahu.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/3-more-trees-in-this-image-this-u-can-see-from-kitchen-window-so-runing-count-17-3-20-trees-already.jpg)
As Ross Douthat of The New York Times noted the other day, every now and then there is a scary news story that demands serious attention, even if readers want to avert their eyes.