A sex exhibition due to open in Ottawa today and aimed at children has been modified, thanks to complaints from the public and a letter to a government minister asking for it to be cancelled. The age limit for unaccompanied children has been raised from 12 to 16 and a video showing youngsters how to masturbate has been removed.

Executive members of the Institute of Marriage and The Family Canada, which is based in Ottawa, visited the 80 per cent government funded Canadian Museum of Science and Technology to discuss the exhibition with the director and to see it for themselves. (See Michael Coren’s article on our front page for a description.)

They then wrote to the Minister of Canadian Heritage and Official Languages, James Moore, criticising the show for espousing “a specific point of view including the approval and promotion of anal sex, multiple sexual partners and sex without emotional/marital commitment” and asked for it to be cancelled. The Minister rang the museum but would not comment publicly on what was said. At this point it appears the thing will be going ahead.

“They called us and they asked questions about it but they did not ask us to do anything about it,” the museum’s vice president of public affairs, Yves St-Onge, said. The Huffington Post reports:

The sex exhibit garnered few complaints when it was first showed in Montreal in 2010 or even in Regina last year, said Julie Mailhot, a press relations officer with the Montreal Science Centre.

“There was no controversy, absolutely no controversy,” she said.

The Montreal Science Centre developed the exhibit in close collaboration with a scientific committee that recommended the appropriate target age should be 12 and above, she said.

“Because around the age of 12 young girls start to develop their hormones and it’s the same for boys, so that’s why they said it was the right time,” Mailhot said.

Just shows; you have to complain. Politely but firmly, which is the way the IMFC did it. Let’s see if the minister is open to such approaches or whether Ottawans have to do more to decontaminate their children's environment.