Against Nature?

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Against Nature? is an exhibition on homosexuality in animals made by the Natural History Museum, University of Oslo, Norway. The exhibition focuses on occurrence and function of homosexuality in animals, and is the first of its kind.

The exhibit contains pictures, animals and models of species known to engage in homosexuality, showing among other things southern right whales and giraffes engaged in same-sex pairing. The museum says one of its aims is to "help to de-mystify homosexuality among people... we hope to reject the all too well known argument that homosexual behaviour is a crime against nature." Most of the exhibition is based on the works of Bruce Bagemihl and Joan Roughgarden.

The exhibition was initiated by the Norwegian Archive, Library and Museum Authority (ABM) as part of their "Break" program, encouraging museums, libraries and archives to do research and exhibitions of controversial and taboo subjects. The exhibition is a direct answer to this challenge, and has received financial support from ABM.

The exhibition ran from September 2006 to August 2007. It was well received, including by the museum's regular visiting groups, mainly families.^[1] The exhibit has been on show in Oslo, Bergen, Trondheim, Maastricht, Genova and in Stockholm (in the last as "Rainbow Animals"). It has, however, been criticized by theology scholars, as missing the point of the traditional terminology attributed to homosexual activity as "against nature." Such activity was most properly said to be against nature because it was using the reproductive power for essentially un-reproductive acts.^[2]

References

Footnotes

↑ Europe | Oslo gay animal show draws crowds. BBC News (2006-10-19). Retrieved on 2011-02-15.
↑ http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/heyj.12246/abstract=Is Sodomy Against Nature? A Thomistic Appraisal

Notations

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