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.

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.”

This is not a religion story. 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. Hold that thought.

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.

This was not a religious conviction — other than the fact that it was seen as a way of attacking traditional religions.

This raises journalism questions, methinks. The unstated theme running through this stunning New Yorker piece is that the Sexual Revolution has become part of a new civil religion. On the moral and cultural left, sexual liberation helps citizens to escape the chains of the nasty old faiths. Concerning Kentler’s work, Douthat notes:

It seems almost impossible that this really happened. 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. The psychological theory of the Sexual Revolution, in which strict sexual rules imposed neurosis while liberation offered wholeness, was embraced with particular fervor in Germany, because the old order was associated not just with prudery but with fascism and Auschwitz.

If traditional sexual taboos had molded the men who built the gas chambers, then no taboos could be permitted to endure. If the old human nature had ended in fascism, then the answer was a new human nature — embodied, in Aviv’s account, by “experimental day-care centers, where children were encouraged to be naked and to explore one another’s bodies,” or appeals from Germany’s Green Party to end the “oppression of children’s sexuality,” or Kentler’s bold idea that sex with one’s foster children could be a form of love and care.

All this was part of a wider Western mood, distilled in the slogan of May 1968: It is forbidden to forbid.

This brings us to the feature’s primary discussion of “morality.”