In the Atlantic, Matthew Walther, editor of the Lamp, a Catholic literary journal (one worth reading and subscribing to), has written a case against the legalization and growing popularity of sports gambling. Walther argues that, though this once-proscribed pastime is now increasingly legal and thus theoretically “safer,” it is now easier for more people to access it as a pastime, and thereby for them to succumb to its debilitations. From “The Sports-Betting Boom Is a Moral Disaster“:
To shield a tiny portion of the population who engaged in behavior that might once have been considered immoral (or “harmful” as many prefer to put it now) from the worst consequences of their actions, we have exposed many millions of others to an apparently mitigated version of the same hazards, and enriched powerful corporate interests in the bargain.
Another Matthew, last name Continetti, author of The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism (a book worth buying), wrote along similar lines in the Washington Free Beacon earlier this year. Continetti places the permeation of sports betting in our society in the context of the general proliferation of social anomie. From “America Gambles With Its Future“:
Gambling is for most people a harmless form of entertainment. But not for all people. For millions of pathological or problem gamblers, betting can end in debt, bankruptcy, family breakdown, criminality, and substance abuse. These tragic outcomes carry costs that, while hard to see, tear at our threadbare social fabric. The speed with which sports gambling has become a ubiquitous, stigma-free, multibillion-dollar industry tells us something about both the state of the country and the condition of the American Right. Something we may not want to hear.
I am on team Matt when it comes to this question. You might call me a MattCon.