State Lottery: Conflict of Interest
Below is the best essay explaining why the lottery should be defeated. It just happens to be written by Dr. Rubel Shelly, who preaches at the church I attend. It was published in the church's weekly newsletter, Lovelines.

The Constitution of the State of Tennessee prohibits lotteries. The people who wrote that anti-lottery legislation didn’t do so in a vacuum. Many of them were poker-playing, horse-racing, put-money-on-something-occasionally gamblers. They weren’t prudes trying to take the fun out of others’ lives.

So why did those framers of our state charter write the document that way?

They had enough knowledge of gambling generally to know that it is an unsavory business. It invites corruption. (Think about Tennessee’s experience with bingo only a few years back.) It preys on human weakness. (Greed.) It lures society’s most vulnerable. (The poor and less-educated play lotteries far more heavily.) And it encourages people to trust luck over hard work and responsibility, to pin their hopes on quick wealth over frugality and saving.

The people who drafted that document believed the new State of Tennessee would be better served by people who worked, saved, and eliminated debt than by people who dreamed of instant wealth from games of chance. Have things really changed that much? Have we discovered that the reverse is better? Hardly!

But can’t we have both? Can’t hard-working, responsible citizens plink down a few dollars occasionally on a game of chance without abandoning their principled lifestyle? Of course they can. But that is another reason our state constitution is written as it is.

The officials who drafted that document believed it would be wrong for them to give official encouragement - and downright wicked to provide enticement - for citizens to pursue frequent and persistent gambling. Ten dollars on my ability to shoot straighter than you is quite different from instant-win lottery tickets in $20- to $60- to $100-packets at grocery stores, gas stations, and free-standing kiosks all over the state!

They weren’t Bible-thumpers who tried to prove that Christian Scripture said anyone who bought a lottery ticket would go to hell. They simply believed that systematic gambling programs were not in the public interest. So they apparently reasoned it would be unethical to put the state in the business of encouraging such behavior.

"States ought not to be in the business of lotteries," says Howard J. Shaffer, director of the division on addictions at Harvard Medical School and a premier researcher on gambling. "It is a conflict of interest. States are here to protect and serve."

The original vision for the State of Tennessee was clearer than the one being offered voters in November. We are being asked to change our constitution, legalize a state lottery, and put Tennessee into the business of trying to make something that is clearly bad for people look good to them.

I’m voting against it. I’m mailing a contribution to Gambling Free Tennessee Inc. (P.O. Box 150871, Nashville, TN 37215) immediately. And I’m asking you to help defeat the lottery proposal as well.

The $40-billion lottery industry needs to expand, lure more players, and maintain its profitability. It has targeted Tennessee. The goal is not to build us better roads, fight crime, or educate our children but to lure our most vulnerable citizens into a trap the writers of our state’s constitution saw only too clearly.

I think they were wise. I hope we don’t undo their ban on state-sponsored gambling.

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If you'd like to read the essay online at the church website, go to www.woodmont.org, click "resources" and then "lovelines."