What does it mean for something to be controversial? Basically, it means there is strong disagreement about the morally justified level of Type I versus Type II errors--how many false positives are worth one false negative, in the wages of morality?
This is of course complicated by the realization that across society, achieving "more" of one kind of justice often necessarily comes at the expense of another kind. In a stable society, the justice hierarchy is fairly well agreed-upon (at least by the "good, wholesome people" you refer to) but things can really go off the rails when profound disagreements develop.
This is how you get "good, wholesome people" to participate in xenophobic genocide or political extermination. The lesson of the 20th century is that these catastrophically tragic inversions of the justice hierarchy can come from extreme positions on either the right or the left of the ideological spectrum.
I think the space of "controversial" ideas is essentially created by the interplay between those who are hypervigilant about extreme ideas on the right which might lead to tragedy, and those who are hypervigilant about extreme ideas on the left which might lead to tragedy. These two groups will likely be mortal enemies for obvious reasons, but a well-functioning liberal society should be able to view both sides impartially and determine when one of them is on to something.
Accordingly, a dysfunctional society is one which starts swallowing the ideas of one side or the other... and I suppose the aim of this journal is to help slow our descent into an internally fractured society of two equally dysfunctional halves.