Heritage Minister James Moore says that exposing young people to an exhibition on sex at the Science Museum in Ottawa is "insulting to taxpayers" and is threatening to give in to anti-sex groups that are the electoral base of the Harper Conservatives.
The exhibition is called "Sex, the show that says it all" and really delivers the goods, as the name says. It answers all the questions that teens are asking.
Prepared for teens 12 to 17 by specialists, teachers, experts on human health, the powerful and frank exhibition is open to exactly the group that has most questions and worries about sex and how it affects them.
The exhibition talks about everything: masturbation, homosexuality, contraception, birth, love, pleasure. The inter-active presentation features plastic mannequins with penises and vaginas and hair!
(On my god, pubic hair! ! What horrors!)
Ottawa is the third large city - after Montreal and Regina - to host the show.
No problem in Montreal or Regina. Only in a prudish old town like Ottawa would a scientific exhibition on sex become an issue.
In Montreal and Regina teachers rushed by hundreds with their classes, happy to finally have some intelligent, scientific backup in the difficult task of teaching sexuality to young people.
Moore speaks of his "deep concern" about the content.
Because of Moore, the museum had to remove the presentation on masturbation. What would Moore have preferred? A reproduction story about birds and bees? What about discussing the sex of angels?
What use would that be to a 12-year girl fellating boys in the class to be accepted by the group?
How much does Moore really know about the sexual preoccupations of today's youth? Moore was a bachelor for 35 years until his marriage four months ago to an attractive woman from the prime minister's office. He has no children yet. Wait until he does. Birds and bees stories may not be sufficient.
Maybe he worries that talk of masturbation might put ideas into the minds of those wicked youth. There are some hardline wing-nuts who think like that. Better ignorance than knowledge.
At what age does Moore think teens are starting to think about masturbation?
Moore, however, is right to think there is "an insult to taxpayers."
But the insult comes from Moore himself who may think that like him, we still live in the last century .
