Gambling for God and Country
Parish Diary
Fr. Peter J. Daly
5/15/98
Gambling for God and Country
"The
lotto," says Andy McFadden, one of our parish's brightest teenagers,
"is taxes for people who can't do math."
Smart kid. A lot smarter than many adults who plunk
down the first fruits of their pay checks each week on lottery tickets. If a teenager can see through the lotto scam,
why can't adults?
The
answer is greed. Greed
in the person playing the lotto. Even bigger greed in the state government that controls it. And the biggest greed of all in the people
who lobby for gambling so they can spend the revenue. In our state, for instance, some of the
lotto proceeds go to billionaires so they won't have to use their own money to
build stadiums. That way they can pay
millionaire athletes to play
football and baseball.
Good social policy ? As Sienfeld used to
say, "I don't think so!"
Right
now our state is debating the legalization of slot machines and casino gaming.
Like many states we already have every conceivable permutation of lottery. The state has totally supplanted the old time
bookies and numbers runners they used to throw in jail for doing the same thing.
The
people lobbying for the new forms of gambling (which always seems to be the
same people who will own the slot machines and casinos) tell us that gambling
will be good for depressed areas.
Yeah
right. Just look at
Gambling,
they say it will be a source of tax revenue.
Which really means they are willing to cut the
government and the politicians in on the action.
Gaming,
they tell us, will create new wealth.
Disguising the fact that all it does is shuffle around the same old
wealth, from us to them.
Is
gambling something the government should be encouraging?
No. It makes nothing. It holds out false hope. It robs the poor and weak.
It
is the old shell game. A con for suckers.
And there is one born every minute.
The
church should say so.
And we probably would say so more forcefully if we weren't so implicated in gambling
ourselves. Bingo!
Don't
get me wrong. I'm not a Puritan. We Catholics believe that everything has its
place. Drinking, sex, dancing and
gambling are all acceptable in moderation and if done responsibly.
A
game of chance for entertainment is OK.
I play a little penny ante poker on vacations. I buy and sell the occasional raffle
ticket. I wouldn't mind being on
Jeopardy or even Wheel of Fortune. I
throw darts.
But
I don't think that anything truly important should be left to games of
chance. And I don't think the church or
the state should encourage the spirit of greed.
As a pastor I've seen one to many people gambling away their rent money.
True
the stakes are generally lower in charity sponsored gaming. True the proceeds go to charity.
But
since when did the church accept an "end justifies the means"
morality?
Shouldn't both the church and the state be trying to teach people
virtues?
Gambling
in churches is charity on the cheap. It
is bad example. It evades our
responsibility. It erodes our moral authority and renders us silent when the
real sharks get in the water to promote the big games.
If
the lotto is taxes for people who can't do math, then bingo is tithing for
people who don't have faith.
Neither
the church nor the state should sell its moral authority for a pot of gold.