Gambling in America article, interesting split in the GOP

this is one of the best overviews on the history of gambling in the US and it takes it right through the fundies and Abramoff and the GOP. Since casinos are still springing up all over the countryside, you might want to take a look:

Sin Cities on a Hill
How legalized gambling moved from the Strip to Main Street.
Greg Beato


Frank Wolf, a 13-term Republican congressman from Virginia, is angry at President Bush, at Republicans in general, and at his fellow mainline Presbyterians. None of them, he charges, is doing enough to combat the proliferation of state-sanctioned gambling in America. As Wolf delivers his speech at the annual conference of the National Coalition Against Legalized Gambling, the 200 or so concerned citizens in the audience murmur their assent.

Outside the Sheraton Hotel in Arlington, Virginia, rain is pouring in nearly biblical quantities. Inside, Wolf is accusing gambling of “tearing families apart.” It’s exploiting the poor, he says. Preying on the elderly. Corrupting the young. Unduly influencing elected officials. As he speaks, he punches at the air with his right fist. He’s exasperated by President Bush’s refusal to place a moratorium on the expansion of Indian gambling. He’s disgusted by once-honorable D.C. law firms that proudly list gambling interests among their clients. He can’t believe that the casinos destroyed by Hurricane Katrina may qualify for millions of dollars in tax breaks as part of the Bush administration’s plan to spur redevelopment on the Gulf Coast.

Wolf isn’t telling the people assembled here anything they don’t already know, but they hang on his words nonetheless. He’s a congressman, after all, and he gets it. He believes, like they believe, that legalized gambling, pushed on the public by cash-starved states, is a major threat to America.

Outside this room, that belief is less common. Nearly a decade ago, Congress funded the National Gambling Impact Study Commission to determine the economic and social consequences of legal gambling, and in 1999, after two years of study, the commission concluded that it was time “to consider a pause in the expansion of gambling.” And perhaps for a moment somewhere, such a pause was considered. But only for a moment. Then four more states introduced lotteries, and the number of Indian casinos in the country rose from around 160 to approximately 400. Annual visits to commercial casinos nearly doubled, jumping from 162.4 million in 1999 to 319 million in 2004. Seventeen U.S. casino markets, covering every region of the country, recorded more than $500 million in gross gaming revenues. Today Utah and Hawaii are the only states where no form of gambling is legal.

more...

http://www.reason.com/0605/fe.gb.sin.shtml

____BLANK1___ = activity
You can use gambling/legalized drinking/professional football/Oil Company
____BLANK2___ = place of activity
You can use casino/bars/football stadium/Refineries

Sin Cities on a Hill
How ____BLANK1___ moved from the ____BLANK2___ to Main Street.

Frank Wolf, a 13-term Republican congressman from Virginia, is angry at President Bush, at Republicans in general, and at his fellow mainline Presbyterians. None of them, he charges, is doing enough to combat the proliferation of state-sanctioned ____BLANK1___ in America. As Wolf delivers his speech at the annual conference of the National Coalition Against ____BLANK1___, the 200 or so concerned citizens in the audience murmur their assent.

Outside the Sheraton Hotel in Arlington, Virginia, rain is pouring in nearly biblical quantities. Inside, Wolf is accusing ____BLANK1___ of “tearing families apart.” It’s exploiting the poor, he says. Preying on the elderly. Corrupting the young. Unduly influencing elected officials. As he speaks, he punches at the air with his right fist. He’s exasperated by President Bush’s refusal to place a moratorium on the expansion of ____BLANK1___. He’s disgusted by once-honorable D.C. law firms that proudly list ____BLANK1___ interests among their clients. He can’t believe that the ____BLANK2___ destroyed by Hurricane Katrina may qualify for millions of dollars in tax breaks as part of the Bush administration’s plan to spur redevelopment on the Gulf Coast.

Wolf isn’t telling the people assembled here anything they don’t already know, but they hang on his words nonetheless. He’s a congressman, after all, and he gets it. He believes, like they believe, that ____BLANK1___, pushed on the public by cash-starved states, is a major threat to America.

---
I think alcohol causes more problems for our society than gambling. I prefer having some sane discussion on these topics.

snip...

Alas, in trying to protect history from gambling, you also have to protect history from history. As any contemporary gambling booster will tell you, Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in North America, was underwritten by a lottery conducted in London by the Virginia Company. That trend continued as the New World moved toward nationhood. With all 13 colonies establishing lotteries at one time or another, government-approved gambling was one of the original features of the landscape.

In the 1700s, newspapers regularly published the odds on local cockfighting matches. Harvard and other institutions of higher learning used lotteries to finance construction projects, as did numerous churches. Ben Franklin helped organize a lottery in 1746, and George Washington was—according to George Sullivan’s 1972 history of lotteries, By Chance a Winner—a “frequent ticket buyer” who won land in one raffle, five pounds in a 1763 lottery, and 16 pounds in a 1766 drawing. Nearly three decades later, he was still playing: In 1793, when the District of Columbia sold 50,000 lottery tickets at $7 apiece to raise funds for federal buildings, Washington purchased tickets for himself and his friends.

Americans’ enthusiasm for gambling didn’t ebb in the 19th century. According to Henry Chafetz’s 1960 book Play the Devil, combatants on both sides of the Civil War “were addicted to faro, poker, casino, euchre, monte, seven-up, and chuck-a-luck.” Other accounts describe bored soldiers betting even on lice races. So Wolf and others who decry the Gettysburg casino effort are correct when they suggest that such a project would undermine the location’s historic atmosphere: The developers have plans for 5,000 slot machines but have expressed no interest whatsoever in betting opportunities involving insects.

Of course, it’s not just aspiring casino developers who are part of a long American tradition; gambling opponents are too. For almost 400 years, prudent, risk-averse critics have been predicting a gambling-induced meltdown. In 1624 the Virginia Assembly made it illegal for ministers to play dice or cards. In 1834, when most states permitted legal lotteries, reformers in Philadelphia branded the local manifestation a “poisonous exotic, whose noxious and rank luxuriance is pervading the land and blighting all our indigenous fruits, showing itself to be wholly unsuited and repugnant to the genius of American soil.”

snip...

(Southern Ohio being relative . . . I think that a few of them south and west of Akron were included) signed promises to the religious reich that they would oppose gambling in the state.

(Well, except for the state lottery and Catholic Church bingo, along with the ponies . . .)

So, in the near future, Ohio will be to casinos what Utah is to alcoholic beverages . . .