"Sex: A Tell-all Exhibition" draws fire from Catholic rights league

OTTAWA - The Catholic Civil Rights League has written to the Canadian Heritage Minister to ask him to review the funding of a controversial sex exhibit aimed at adolescents at the Canadian Museum of Science and Technology.

Sex: A Tell-all Exhibition, opened May 17 at the Ottawa museum and runs till year’s end.

“Based on information from the museum’s own web site (www.sciencetech.technomuses.ca), as well as on information provided to a local contact during a preview, I find this material is far too advanced and detailed for the age group for which it is intended, and in any case has little if anything to do with the museum’s stated mandate ” wrote League executive director Joanne McGarry to Heritage Minister James Moore.

The League is also calling on members to complain to Moore about the exhibit.

Patrick Meagher and his wife Alba Pascual-Meagher, both Catholics, attended a media preview before the opening.

“If I hadn’t gone and my wife had come back and told me what she had seen, I would have been convinced she was exaggerating,” Meagher said.

The exhibit includes photographs of men’s and women’s genitalia, as well as animations of a boy and a girl masturbating.

“I couldn’t believe the stuff I was seeing,” said Meagher, who added the exhibit is “teaching kids to experiment with sex, multiple partners, anal sex, ‘friends with favours,’ homosexual activity and masturbation.”

Yves St-Onge, vice president for public affairs at the museum, said the exhibition is well-marked so that no one will inadvertently enter it. 

“We have established it as a segregated area, monitored by an employee,” he said. “Every visitor, especially school groups, will be informed.”

St-Onge said the exhibit was designed in Montreal, where it first appeared, after extensive consultation with social scientists, doctors, nurses, public health practitioners, teachers and government officials.

St-Onge disagrees the exhibit encourages homosexuality or other sexual behaviour. It does not encourage people to question their sexual orientation, or experiment, it merely provides the plain facts from a biological and psychological point of view, he said.