The sexual revolution began just over 50 years ago and reverberates still today. The revolution swept away old prejudices concerning human sexuality and sparked the movements for women's equality as well as new legal rights for gays and lesbians. But, like all revolutions, there were excesses which are still being dealt with today.
The German Green Party was at the forefront of the sexual revolution in the 1970s and 80s. But some of its causes from the heady days of its ascent can be seen, in retrospect, as horribly naive. Or possibly even criminal:
Walter and Klecha found that the Greens made a case at a national party conference in 1980 for striking two sections of Germany's penal code that make sexual acts between adults and children under 14 illegal. Groups that were closely aligned with Germany's pro-business, free-market liberal FDP party also supported allowing sexual relations between adults and children.
How could it have happened? "It was a time of major change," psychotherapist Jürgen Lemke told DW. The Greens founded themselves to rebel against conservative structures - a sexual and political release - they wanted to create a new system and turning their backs on authorities was just one of their demands.
"I think some people looked the other way and said: 'We're going to show the other parties how alternative and how open we are - that we have finally got past the Nazi era and accepting the sexual revolution," Greens founding member Eva Quistorp told DW.
Green Party polticians have been among the loudest critics of the Catholic Church and the attempts by the Vatican to whitewash or cover up the cases of child sexual abuse. But the Greens don't seem to want to confront their own dark history - much less make restitution to the victims. Last week the editor of the left-leaning (and Green-friendly) Tageszeitung cut (censored) an essay by one her own editors - Christian Füller - which was highly critical of the Green Party and its handling of the child sex scandal in its past. In his essay - which can be read here - Christian Füller argues that pedophila wasn't simply an abberation, advocated by some crazy extemists in its rank, but rather was core to the Green ideology of total liberation. Hence Füller's subtitle to his essay:
Die Grünen wollten die sexuelle Revolution. Jetzt sollten sie sich um die Opfer kümmern
(The Greens wanted the sexual revolution. Now they should take care of its victims.)
And if you said anything against this, you were just an American prude.
Posted by: Hattie | August 26, 2013 at 01:02 PM