A mile and a half up the Ohio River from our house, over on the Indiana side, a quaint-looking paddle wheeler sits in dock at the town of Rising Sun. A casual observer, glancing quickly through the trees, might assume he is glimpsing the Delta Queen or the Mississippi Queen, two passenger boats that ply the Ohio and Mississippi systems.

But no, this boat at Rising Sun is the Grand Victoria, a gambling casino that never leaves port.

When the Hyatt Company brought the Grand Victoria from New Orleans to Rising Sun, the boat was required by the state of Indiana to leave port for two-hour cruises — up around the bend and back again, virtually all day long, nearly 365 days a year, including Christmas.

Now, however, Indiana has granted casino companies permission for their gambling boats to remain permanently in dock. In that way, customers do not have to wait to board the boat, nor do they have to limit their visit to two hours. Rather, they can stream endlessly onto the boat and can stay as long as they like, even as late as 5 a.m.

There are no clocks on the Grand Victoria to remind customers of the time. The painted windows on the boat are fake, and so, once inside, customers are programmed to be lost to time and the outside world.

States Roll the Dice

The state of Indiana has licensed five of these casino boats on the Ohio River and five more in other locations. In addition Indiana, once known as a conservative state, now has off-track betting parlors in downtown Indianapolis and elsewhere.

Indiana, however, is not alone.

The love affair with widespread institutional gambling extends to nearly every state. Government-owned lotteries, for example, are an enormous and accepted means of revenue in many states. Casinos, although not owned by state governments, are licensed by them and provide so much tax revenue that it is in the interest of state governments to promote them and to give casino companies hefty breaks. Little wonder that big, publicly held gambling companies were among the darlings of Wall Street during the '90s.

Native American tribes, too, participate heavily in the gambling industry, once again urged on by government. When traveling home from our vacation place in northwestern Michigan, we pass an ever-expanding Native Americanowned casino, its parking lots bulging, just one of scores of such casinos across the country.

Gambling is surely as old as man. The wagering instinct seems embedded in the human urge to take risks, to see what might be gained with only a little outlay. Horses, fighting roosters, dogs, sporting events, card games and so forth have always been the object of betting. America, like most other countries, has, since its beginning, had its share of gamblers.

It is conceivable that, proportionate to the population, there is scarcely more gambling now than there ever was. Gambling, after all, was part of the American frontier. Furthermore, riverboat gambling, the “gaming industry” likes to remind us, is a tradition in America.

Without denying that nice people do gamble and do so just for fun, there is no question that gambling in this country wears a new face.

It is no longer an individual game of chance. These days gambling is statesanctioned and often state-sponsored. States have become so dependent on the revenue from lotteries and the taxes on casino winnings that they are locked into encouraging ever-bigger lottery powerball games and ever-closer buddy arrangements with casino owners to expand gambling operations. Along with big gambling, needless to say, has come a huge bureaucracy to regulate it and heavy law enforcement to police it.

At the same time, questioning whether small towns ought to depend so heavily on gambling revenue to shore up their economy or whether Native American tribes ought to rely on their casino businesses for their greatest source of revenue is to brand oneself as insufferably politically incorrect.

The morally irrefutable reason or, more accurately, the excuse for communities like Rising Sun to promote as its major industry the Grand Victoria riverboat casino is that the Grand Victoria creates jobs and pays big taxes, which supposedly go to the community's public schools and to improve streets and public works. Even though proceeds from gambling may go to renovate or build a schoolhouse, it can never be proved that gambling profits have improved the quality of public education even one iota. Instead, it can be shown that the gambling industry offers shoddy sustenance to a community.

“Beginning Aug. 1,” reads the fullpage advertisement in the Cincinnati Enquirer, “Argosy Casino (in Lawrenceburg, Ind.,) will be firmly tied to the dock. We've extended our hours, so you can play until 5 a.m. every day. It's all right here, just 20 minutes from Cincinnati. Your ship has come in. And this time, it's not going anywhere.”

Ecstatic gamblers now report how delighted they are to receive this new convenience of wee-hour gambling. Yet is this even more intense gambling exposure contributing to the good of citizens — or is it corrupting them?

To take but one example of corruption, downriver at Vevay, Ind., Pinnacle Entertainment, owner of the Belterra Casino, recently paid $2.26 million in fines and was forced to close the casino for three days because of a prostitution scandal in which the company flew in out-of-state prostitutes and offered them to guests at a casino-sponsored golf tournament.

Citing another lamentable case, the Indianapolis Star, in an editorial criticizing Indiana's addiction to gambling revenues, deplored that on the same day the state gaming commission fined the Belterra Casino, the Indiana Supreme Court suspended the license of an Evansville attorney with the unfortunate name of Allan Loosemore Jr., “who stole clients’ money to feed his gambling addiction.” Loosemore, the Star noted, “is one of an estimated 45,000 problem gamblers in the state.”

Games of chance, or wagers, says the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “are not in themselves contrary to justice. They become morally unacceptable when they deprive someone of what is necessary to provide for his needs and those of others” (No. 2413).

Adds the catechism: “The passion for gambling risks becoming an enslavement.”

The enslavement can be subtle and insidious. Rising Sun appears to have a more thriving economy since the Grand Victoria came to town. Yet the town is congested, and the tone and quality of the community have changed for the worse.

So far, our little hamlet of Rabbit Hash, Ky., across the river remains relatively immune — in part because when Grand Victoria owners made the outrageous proposal to buy our tiny village some wise Rabbit Hash citizens laughed and said, “No thanks.” The owners wanted literally to raze our town and turn it into a parking lot — all in exchange for the opportunity to run a ferry from the Kentucky side to the Indiana side so as to serve potential gambling customers.

Towns that rely for revenue on gambling casinos are related to the old company coal towns of the eastern Kentucky mountains. The towns are kept women, so to speak — except that in those company towns of yore, at least a product, that is, coal, emerged. In a gambling town, nothing emerges.

That is the point.

Gambling may be fun, but fun or addictive, in either case it offers mostly empty pockets; it offers nothing for something. By nearly anyone's standard, gambling at 3 or 4 in the morning is not a fruitful way to spend time. When a handful of people engage in such activity, it may be relatively harmless. When government, however, urges everincreasing numbers of citizens to deluge casinos, all because the state cannot survive financially without taxes from gambling, then the state acts as a parasite rather than a protector. It consequently corrupts its own citizenry.

As more and more exotic gambling schemes invade American life, one wonders how our souls can remain unaffected. Even non-gamblers are touched when political decisions are made to court the gambling industry.

Slick and Slippery

“Gambling itself is morally neutral,” writes moral theologian Msgr. William Smith (Homiletic and Pastoral Review, December 1995), but “issues relating to gambling can make it morally unacceptable. This, I believe, is especially the case with state-sponsored and state-advertised gambling. It is a general principle of social justice that civil government should rely on equitable tax policies and not excessively on tax revenues from gambling. It is here that we may be constructing a nation of gamblers and approaching the risk of ‘enslavement’ which the catechism repudiates.”

Msgr. Smith speaks of a “gambling epidemic” that masquerades as a social good. Because gambling revenues supposedly go to good causes, especially schools, then any personal heartache or public corruption engendered by gambling fever can be ignored or at least tolerated for a so-called greater good. Who, after all, would oppose better schools for our children?

“Thanks to the public blessing of gambling by government,” says Msgr. Smith, “the moral stigma was removed: some high rollers now pretend to be big-time civic heroes.” Gambling in a friendly Friday-night poker game is light years away from what Msgr. Smith declares is actually “state-sanctioned redistribution of wealth — moving money from people who don't have much of it to people who have plenty.”

Boarding the casino riverboats at all hours are the retired set by day and the younger, hipper set by night. Inside the casino, noisy slot machines and garish, flashing lights provide diversion and stave off loneliness for two or three hours. Inside the casino reality appears as a thrilling risk. What might I get for nothing?

Sooner or later, however, customers give up hope and come back outside to the real world. In the real world there is indeed the thrill of risk, but the risk is the opportunity to answer a call that promises not nothing but everything.

Anne Husted Burleigh, a free-lance writer and contributor to Magnificat, writes from her farm at Rabbit Hash, Kentucky.