Fletcher Adds New Images in Debate Over Gambling

The facts about casino gambling (“gaming” is the preferred term in the industry) do not lend themselves well to the absolutes of a thirty second television spot or a blurb the size of your computer screen. There are pros and cons and shades of gray that neither candidate can or will take the time to help the general public explore.

Like high school students with a paper due, we went to the web to do some homework. Thanks to some helpful websites, a mixed picture of the benefits and ills of casino gaming emerges. Both sides are correct in some of their assertions – casino gaming makes money for the host, the state and to some extent, the local economy. There is also a societal cost in additive behaviors. Whether one outweighs the other is anyone’s bet.

The history of gambling in Kentucky is a combination of race track bets, charitable bingo and local lotteries licensed by cities throughout the Commonwealth for various projects. The local lottery was outlawed by the passage of the 1891 Kentucky Constitution.

Not everyone was happy about the new law. In a lawsuit that went all the way to the US Supreme Court in1897, Douglas v. Commonwealth, Mr. Douglas alleged that the license he bought from the City of Louisville to conduct a lottery before passage of the new constitution should be honored. He argued that his right to contract under the US Constitution was violated.

Writing for the Court, Justice Harlan thundered…

“The legislature, by giving or bartering away the power to guard and protect the public morals, could 'convert the state into dens of bawdy houses, gambling shops, and other places of vice and demoralization, provided the grantees paid for the privileges, and thus deprive the state of its power to repeal the grants, and all control of the subjects, as far as the grantees are concerned; and the trust duty of protecting and fostering the honesty, health, morals, and good order of the state would be cast to the winds, and vice and crime would triumph in their stead. “

So died lotteries in Kentucky until Wallace Wilkinson brought back the idea in 1987 when he used the idea of a state run lottery to fund education to beat Steve Beshear and a troop of other Democrats to the governor’s office.