Moral Conviction

by Tony Lawrence

8/12/07 -- I suppose that some of the CasinoFacts folks really believe that a casino is harmful to this town. Perhaps they buy the crime argument, in spite of plain data that shows otherwise and investigation by our own Chief of Police. Or maybe they are convinced that the casino will destroy local business, ignoring the fact the the very road that leads to Foxwoods is littered with new restaurants and other businesses that have been built after the casino.. Maybe they believe all of it.

Or maybe they just grab at any excuse because their basic moral conviction is that gambling is sinful and should be illegal.

Certainly our society makes other activities illegal: we have a long running "war against drugs" because of a very similar conviction, and we once tried to do the same thing with alcohol (and with eerily similar arguments, by the way). If a majority of people think that a certain activity has too many negative "costs" associated with it, sooner or later you'll have laws against it.

And of course we already have such laws right here in Massachusetts. Try setting up a gambling hall here without a charitable purpose and you'll quickly find out more than you want to know about those laws.

It is interesting that we do make exceptions for charity, isn't it? If gambling is so dangerous for gamblers (you know, the horrible bankruptcies, the irreparable harm to families, the tragic suicides, all of that), then why on earth would we allow churches and other charitable concerns to slip under the law's protection? In other words, are we really worried about the gambler's losses, or is our concern more that we don't like the greedy profit motive behind it? But never mind that.

The fact is that Indian Gaming is legal. That battle has already been fought, and those who would protect us from our own sin lost. Tribes have a legal right to operate casinos on their own sovereign land. Why do they have that right? It's not because they are a "sovereign nation" - they can't ride roughshod over our environmental protection laws on their sovereign lands, they can't enact looser drug laws like Holland and some other countries have; no, we limit their "sovereign rights" pretty carefully. So why is it that they can run casinos?

Because we wanted to address another social ill. Just as we allow churches to run Bingo, and allow a charitable fund raiser to do a "Las Vegas night", we allow recognized tribes to run Casinos to help address the very real poverty and despair (including bankruptcies, irreparable damage to families, and yes, alcoholism and suicide) that has plagued Indians since we rounded them up at gunpoint and force marched them to their new "homes".

That's what it really comes down to at the end. This is a legal activity that we as a nation consciously decided to allow. We already weighed its value and its costs, and decided that the value gained indicated our course of action. That a handful of people have convinced themselves that they do not agree should be of little interest to the rest of us: this is a lawful activity for the Wampanoags to engage in, the "social costs" have been considered, as have the benefits (both to the tribe and to Middleboro and the State), and the decision is plain. We allow Indian Gaming because we as a nation believe that it the right thing to do.

* Tony is a regular contributor to OakPointCommunity.org .