You can bet this ruling will come back to haunt us
Govt is enabling gamblers
It’s bad enough to have to wonder if your favorite team tanked the outcome of a game in jockeying for a better playoff position or higher draft choice.
It’s been known to happen. But now, thanks to yesterday’s Supreme Court decision nullifying the federal law prohibiting betting on baseball, football and basketball games, that wagering fan will also have to wonder whether he or she is a dope to believe players actually care as much as the loyalists who wear their colors.
With fortunes at stake, it’s not hard to imagine the windfalls that could be surreptitiously offered to players capable of choreographing an outcome.
And if you can’t assume the game’s legit, then how can you pour your heart into it, let alone your hard-earned dollars?
More than undermining the integrity of the competition, which it’s sure to do by innuendo if not indictment, gambling’s also a scourge that destroys marriages, homes, careers and reputations.
So the government’s enabling of it is unconscionable.
Here’s how gambling works: The “house” has to win for the game to work, so if the “house” is a municipality, such as the commonwealth of Massachusetts, which is the bookie behind the Lottery, it clearly has a rooting interest in setbacks suffered by its citizens.
We call ourselves a nation of laws, and from the very outset — indeed the Preamble to our Constitution — we maintained these laws were established to “promote the general welfare” of the citizenry.
But whose general welfare did the Supreme Court promote yesterday?
Gamblers? Obviously. Bookies? Clearly.
Hey, who knows, maybe Pete Rose will be welcomed into Cooperstown after all!
Laws are constantly being challenged by anarchists and dissidents who recoil at the thought of anyone telling them what they cannot do.
They certainly do “understand what No means” and they don’t like it one bit.
While quick to assert rights, they remain mum on responsibilities, unlike rational thinkers who understand we sometimes have a responsibility not to do the things we have a right to do.
To a conscientious citizen that’s not complicated.
“We have reached midnight in the moral order,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once wearily noted. “A time when nothing’s absolutely right and nothing’s absolutely wrong because the majority opinion seems to be, ‘Everyone’s doing it so it must be OK.’ ”
But King understood everything is not OK.
One thing that’s definitely not OK now is what the Supreme Court did yesterday, sowing seeds of what’s sure to be a bitter harvest.
And yes, you can bet on that.