The government taketh away and the government giveth back: A brief, imprecise history of gambling

I don’t know how long gambling has been part of the human genome, but I suspect it embedded itself there when upright primates first started to communicate with one another.

“Watch this!” one caveman might have told another as he proceeded to bash a saber tooth tiger over the head with his club.

“I bet you can’t do that again,” the other one might have said.

And so the fun began. And millions of years later, as with all things that are fun, government in this country decided to put an end to gambling, because it was bad for people. I remember when I was a kid; the local Catholic priest was arrested for running a Bingo Night at the church.

But later, when local governments needed money, some of them decided that maybe gambling wasn’t so bad after all – as long as they regulated it and took a piece of the action. So they began, in their different and diverse jurisdictions, to allow pari-mutuel betting at horse racing tracks and issuing Bingo licenses. Nevada allowed heavily regulated casino gambling. Eventually, even in some Bible belt states, state-run lotteries appeared. While gambling might be bad for you, it’s not so bad if the profits go for education, they reasoned. And of course, if there is an emergency, the funds can be diverted from education for other uses.

So what the state took away, the state slowly began to give back. Not only did they give it back, they advertised the gift rather heavily. In New York City, the “dollar and a dream” and “you’ve got to be in it to win it” campaigns especially appealed to what, in the 60’s, we called “welfare mothers.” Ever wonder why big lottery winners so often come from poverty. Odds are that they would. As far as state lotteries go, not only has the government returned the right to gamble, it has gone into the business.

Decades later, here in Ohio, the public is still debating the morality of gambling. The airwaves have been bombarded with advertising, both pro and con, on Issue Three, the proposed constitutional amendment to authorize casinos in Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati and Toledo, on the ballot this November. They talk about tax dollars and who would benefit. But in reality, both sides are using deceptive advertising to dance around the real issue: The Christian right is opposed to gambling on moral grounds, and the pro casino forces favor it out of their own greed.

I’m not a moralist. I like to gamble. Gambling is fun and I should be free to do it, if I choose. Like everything else, I expect it to be taxed and that someone will make a profit. That’s okay. I favor casino gambling in Ohio, and I do buy the argument that it will help support the economy and that we are currently letting that business escape to our bordering states. I have gone to Indiana to gamble. And I don’t like some religious zealot telling me what I can and cannot do; especially on some interpretation of the Bible that I am not sure is even correct. Show me where in the Ten Commandments it says, “Thou shalt not gamble!”