Assessing the arguments against casino gambling
Freddie Kissoon column
Kaieteur News
January 10, 2007

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Do you know that the Indian Government asks for Guyanese to submit to an HIV test before they can access a successful scholarship? We will come to the relevance of that below. If and when casino gambling comes to Guyana, I doubt I will ever visit the floor, much less take a chance on the machine. It is just not my style.

That doesn't mean that I am against casino gambling. I have done several articles on casino gambling in which I have evaluated the flaws in the religious approach.

I need not repeat those arguments. Suffice it to say that the religious advocates see a moral wrong in gambling. The PNC and Christopher Ram are the only two well-known voices that have come out against the legalisation of casino gambling. Their angle is that this type of nocturnal activity is intricately bound up with money laundering. Money laundering is the eventual outcome of drug trafficking. Casino gambling, then, in the observation of the PNC and Mr. Ram, is an activity that is dreadfully connected with the narcotics world.

In one of my columns on casino gambling, in December, I challenged the church polemicists not just to condemn casino gambling because it is immoral, but to also keep their arguments within the realm of the comparative method. In other words, why is casino gambling so immoral when compared to other things?

They have not proven to me as yet that it is. Just to say that it is doesn't make it immoral. In Sunday's issue of the Stabroek News, Mr. Ram came out against casino gambling, but his approach is immensely faulty.

I can forgive Mr. Ram because, as an accountant he may not have reached into the world of ancient Greece and Rome to understand human behaviour. But the PNC has scholars who are supposed to know better.

I have a feeling that both the PNC and Mr. Ram cannot come up with strong intellectual critiques against this form of gambling, but they are taking a political stance, meaning that since the PPP Government is introducing the legislation, they want to denounce it.

Let us assess Mr. Ram's SN letter of last Sunday. If you can find the fault lines, then his case is a non-starter. Mr. Ram is adamant that casinos in the US harbour dirty drug people. But where are the big names that have been prosecuted since the activity started in the US in the fifties?

All the PNC and Mr. Ram tell us is, “Hey, this thing is not good; it brings drug people with it.” But why single out casino gambling as the only thing that is dangerous to the fabric of society?

Are there other forms of human activity that have brought no good to this world? Why don't the PNC and Mr. Ram clamour for the abolition of politics? Politics has done nothing good for civilisation. From ancient times, when Socrates was executed because the Athenian Government was insecure with him, right up to the machinations of successive American Governments that armed and encouraged Saddam Hussein, politics has been a destructive thing.

Let's offer the PNC and Mr. Ram a brief list. The assassination of Julius Caesar; the execution of Thomas More; the western support for Hitler against the Soviets at a time when Hitler was murdering the Jews; the fascism of Fidel Castro; the endless invasions of the US against small countries, the betrayal of the entire Third World (maybe except India, though Indira Gandhi may be an exception) by its post-colonial leaders; the African tragedy where the leaders find guns more important than bread. The evidence is there that politics is not good for society. Shouldn't we then ban politics?

Let's move to Catholicism and the dangerous Religious Right in the US. The past five years have seen the sexual ravages against innocent boys conducted by several Catholic priests in the US.

In Rwanda, high-ranking religious officials of the Catholic Church engaged in genocide against the Tutsi people. In many Muslim countries, but in particular Algeria, Muslim activists went about savagely murdering their own people in the name of Islam.

Hindus and Muslims in India love to hate then kill each other. In Nigeria, Christians and Muslims are always exterminating each other.

In the US, the Religious Right comes close to being out-and-out fascist people that will send the US to permanent war with whichever country they don't like. On the basis of the atrocious things committed in the Name of God (the Muslims say God is great; if He was great, He would have struck down most of His faithful followers since the Holy Roman Empire for being bad people), wouldn't it be logical to say that Religion brings conflict and perversion to the world?

Let's look at the world of business. It would shock the entire world if its inhabitants had read an article two weeks ago on the exploitative nature of business in general, in the Guardian (London). It is a phenomenal article that shows how businesses in the UK are robbing the country by not paying taxes.

The article went on to show the massive cheating on VAT by the largest and wealthiest British business firms. Around the world, in the past and in the present, businesses do not come clean on their taxes. One can say cheating on taxes is to business what fire is to a cigarette.

Are the PNC and Mr. Ram in support of the abolition of private commerce and the world of business?

Let's move on to the world of modelling. Model houses are sophisticated whore houses. Most of the girls have to sleep with the men who will give them a break.

Then there is, finally, the judiciary. I can come up with the same statistics as Mr. Ram can for casino gambling about the dirty world of the judiciary worldwide. For every casino operator who is found guilty of a related crime, there is a judge who was found guilty of unbecoming conduct.

What is my point since I began? That if you dig deep you will find that, if not all, then most forms of human behaviour are flawed. Why pick on casino gambling?

I end where I began. Guyana has the highest rate of HIV infected people in the Caribbean, yet we have one of the largest number of churches per capita in the world. I hope you see what I am getting at.