Last summer, the Saskatchewan Science Centre hosted a touring exhibit called Sex: A Tell-All Exhibition. It was organized by the Montreal Science Centre with the goal of providing pre-teen children and teenagers (and any adults who were interested, too) with straightforward information about human reproduction and other aspects of sexuality.
You can read Carle Steel’s take on the exhibit here.
The exhibit opens Friday at the Canada Science & Technology Museum in Ottawa, but it’s already apparently generated a fair bit of controversy. No less a personnage than federal Heritage Minister James Moore has waded into the fray, chastising the museum for daring to host the exhibit which he said is an affront to, you guessed it, “taxpayers”. He also stated that it was contrary to the museum’s mandate to “foster scientific and technological literacy throughout Canada”.
If there’s one thing the Harper Conservatives are expert at fostering it’s scientific literacy, so I’ll yield to his judgment on that point. In a statement released by his office, Minister Moore encourages Canadians who feel as he does to besiege the museum with complaints about the exhibit — which was assembled with the help of teachers, nurses, doctors and sexologists.
In the Ottawa Citizen article linked to above, Saskatchewan Science Centre director Sandy Baumgartner is quoted as saying that when Sex was in Regina last summer it caused nary a ripple of concern. Obviously, our three Conservative MPs Tom Lukiwski, Ray Boughen and Andrew Scheer were totally asleep at the switch and failed miserably in their sacred duty to protect the impressionable youth of Regina from disgusting material like this by launching their own vitriolic attack on the Science Centre. Shame on them, I say.