Right-to-die group denied booth at aging expo

By Logan Jenkins5:47 P.M.SEPT. 2, 2014
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This May 10, 2014 photo provided by AARP Life@50+ shows the discount booth for AARPDiscounts.com at AARP's semi-annual Life@50+ National Event & Expo in Boston.

The last of the Baby Boomers turns 50 this year, and if they want to cry into their beer about getting older, at least they can now buy it at a discount. The first of the so-called senior discounts kick in at age 50, generally along with an AARP card. (AP Photo/AARP Life@50+) The Associated Press

AARP, host of an upbeat expo on the joys of aging, is treating the Final Exit Network like skunks at a summer garden party.
Well, the polecats are planning to make a bit of a stink over the weekend.

In case you’re cloudy about Final Exit Network, it’s a national organization (related to the former Hemlock Society) that, in the words of local right-to-die activist Faye Girsh, “provides information and support to its members who are considering a peaceful, hastened death.”

In March, Final Exit Network applied for a booth at a spring expo in Boston.

AARP responded that it had not established guidelines for right-to-die groups but hoped to do so this year.

In June, responding to a Final Exit request for booth space at the San Diego convention, AARP wrote: “After further consideration, we are unable to approve right-to-die societies and other like organizations as exhibitors.”

As a Medicare-card-carrying member of the Boomer generation, I get why illness and death might be unwelcome at AARP’s feel-good bashes.

Assisted death is a downer and politically volatile to boot.
The AARP Ideas@50+ expo (how youthfully hip is that name?) promises to be an age-defying celebration of eternally vital life.

Stars like Kevin Spacey and Julia Louis-Dreyfus will shine.

The expo’s motivational themes — health/wellness, technology/innovation, travel/lifestyle and money/work — are all uppers. Let’s gallop to a hundred!

But life’s end game? Planning how to negotiate the legally dicey challenge of ceasing upon the midnight without pain?

Outside the Convention Center, Final Exit members will try to engage the public. They’ll hope to draw attention, even sympathy, from the expo exclusion.

According to Wendell Stephenson, Final Exit’s president, AARP never explained why it rejected his category of nonprofit.

Through the course of Tuesday, I could not obtain a specific comment from AARP.

But we can assume AARP made a decision not to include the right to die as an integral part of its prescriptions for living into old age.

Perhaps it didn’t want to offend religious and/or cultural conservatives who oppose any “hastening” of death on moral grounds.

Whatever the reason, Final Exit can’t enter.

To be sure, it’s AARP’s party. Conventions aren’t public flea markets where anyone gets to set up a tent.

But then again, any group has the right to complain about being excluded from the bazaar of ideas.

That’s the American way of life and, in this rare case, death.

http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2014/...ied-aarp-expo/