Lexington & Other Cities: Vote NO on KEEP's Casino Plan

Today's Intercom contains the letter that I sent yesterday to the Lexington City Council, who will tonight (Thursday, Nov. 17, 2005), vote to endorse the proposals of the Kentucky Equine Education Project's (KEEP) for casino gambling in Kentucky. KEEP is chaired by former Governor Brereton C. Jones. KEEP wants a constitutional amendment that will: 1) authorize full casinos at Kentucky racetracks; 2) will prohibit proliferation of casinos; 3) will designate where the tax proceeds from such operations would be expended. Jones claims he doesn't want it unless it is good for Kentucky.

As most of my readers know, the Council has been engaged in opposing expansion of gambling, at racetracks or elsewhere, since the early 1990s. I urge my Lexington readers especially to call their City Council Representative before today's meeting to urge them to vote "NO" on the resolution to endorse the KEEP casino proposal.

KEEP's new campaign, "Keep It In Kentucky", is a gross misnomer: We will experience a doubling or more of per capita participation rate in casino gambling; a doubling or more of gambling addictions with all the incumbent costs; and most of the money will still go out of state to the stockholders of the racetracks and the companies that operate the casinos, most of which are based in Nevada. What I said in my letter, below, to Lexington Council members is applicable to every other town or city in Kentucky with a racetrack.

To support casino gambling in Kentucky, and especially in Lexington, is to succumb to the lure of fool's gold. If you believe it will mean economic benefits for Lexington, then I'd like to sell you a bridge. I believe that it would be the worst mistake ever for our city. Let me enumerate several sound reasons to oppose the proposals of KEEP.

First, whenever a society decides to remove "fences" that it has previously installed around particular activities, we should think why the fences were put up in previous generations. We need also to ask ourselves, before taking such a step, what kind of society we want to endow upon our children and our children's children, what kind of world?

The reason that gambling casinos were previously restricted to places like Nevada, where there was no existing economy, is that gambling is a predatory economic enterprise: it cannibalizes discretionary dollars from consumers. Some of the states with the worst fiscal crises are those with casinos. Where is the fix? The only communities that have benefited from casinos are those communities that had no vibrant economy to begin with.

Second, do you really believe that other businesses will want to move to a casino city? It hasn't worked in any other locality in the nation. They do not want to move to casino cities because of the high degree of addiction that results, with incumbent losses to businesses ranging from lost days at work to the worst case scenario of embezzlement. In cities with casinos the only new businesses were an exponential increase in the numbers of pawn shops.


The normal rate of pathological gambling is 1-2% of the adult population. Detroit now confesses to an addiction rate of 11%. In Biloxi and Tunica, the addiction rate is 5%. Multiply the adult population of Lexington times those percentages, then multiply it times the annual average cost of a single pathological gambler (from $10,300 - $13,000), and you might begin to see that casinos are losing propositions.

Third, no U.S. city with a casino ranks high in terms of "quality of life". For me, casinos and slots parlors and cities that have them are tacky, tawdry, and without class or imagination. I was born in Lexington and have always been proud to call it my home: it is a "class-act" kind of place to live. Our city was originally called the "Athens of the West", and our institutions were equal to the Ivy League colleges. University of Kentucky President Lee Todd wants to make the university one of the top-20 public universities in the nation, but casinos are enemical to the purposes of education. Casinos argue to consumers that life is luck; and you might as well win. Of course, the house always wins.

Do you want a casino right smack next to our university? Every year, university administrators in Mississippi have to warn parents of their students not to give their children an entire semester's worth of funds, but to parcel out their financial support to their young student a week or a month at a time. Why? They discovered that the students were gambling away their money within the first month of each semester. Electronic forms of gambling are the fastest growing addiction among young adults.

Casinos constitute a cultural blight wherever they are allowed to exist and proliferate. Although KEEP says that they believe in non-proliferation, no state has ever been able to stop the proliferation once the door was opened. Just ask the people of South Carolina who finally got rid of them in their state after years of enduring their cancerous spread throughout their communities. I've heard the one-time city manager of Colorado City, Jack Hidahl, say: "I'd tell anyone who was thinking of opening their community to casino gambling to have his head examined." Why? Because, he says, "we lost our town, our community, our neighbors. It's just not the same place anymore."

Fourth, the numbers of dollars that KEEP talks about are hypothetical, while I can promise you that the social costs will keep growing. Each compulsive gambler negatively impacts 15 other people. That's 15 other people-students who will have trouble at school, family members or spouses who will worry about whether they are going to lose their house or worse. According to Harrah's own figures, the average rate of "participation in casino gambling" overall for Kentucky is only 16%, while it is closer to double that in Northern Kentucky and Louisville, cities with riverboats in their backyards. Putting casinos in Kentucky will mean that the entire state can expect a doubling of participation rates in gambling, a doubling of the current social costs of gambling.

The money does not fall out of the sky. There is only a finite sum of money in an economy at any one time. Casinos do not make money grow on trees. In order to generate the $400 million that KEEP suggests the state will receive, people will have to gamble $1.29 BILLION dollars. That means $1.29 billion will not be spent on other things in Kentucky: groceries; trips to the doctor and dentist; entertainment; education, books.

Finally, let me say that I love horses, and I love the beauty of the animal and the horse farms in our area. But here's the thing: I love the people of our state, our children, and the quality of our life far more. We can find more creative ways to support the horse industry without destroying the quality of life in our city.

Please do not vote to endorse KEEP's proposals. At least postpone your decision to investigate this matter far more closely.

Two Other Quick Notes

Dear Readers:

Two other messages for this first week of November:

First, I hope that you will take time to listen to the Speaking of Faith radio program on your local national public radio station. In the Lexington area, it airs at 6:00 p.m., on WEKU (88.9 FM) on Sundays. Krista Tippett, the show's host, is a terrific journalist, and thoughtful commentator on religious issues in America today. She has a degree from Yale Divinity School.

The guests on the Speaking of Faith program this Sunday will be the friends of the Kentucky Council of Churches, the Rev. Dr. Joan Brown Campbell, former general secretary of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA, and the Rev. Dr. Thomas Hoyt, Jr., bishop of the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church in Louisiana and Mississippi, and currently the president of the National Council of Churches.

Both have been speakers at the Annual Assemblies of the Kentucky Council of Churches, and Bishop Hoyt was here on September 12, for the Compassion Sunday Interfaith event that we held in response to the hurricane disasters.

They are worth the effort to mark your calendar so that you will remember to turn on your radio at 6:00 Sunday.

Secondly, now that I have returned from a wonderful vacation with one of my daughters (we traveled throughout Austria in mid-September), and now that the annual meeting of the Council of Churches is behind us, I wanted to let you know that I am going to try to publish a "blog" at least once every two weeks. These Intercom blogs will address some of the current political and legislative issues of our state and nation. The next blog will focus on the big push in the coming legislative session to put casinos in our cities and towns.

So, keep tuned. Your responses, by the way, to these blogs, are welcome. I look forward to hearing from you...either electronically or otherwise. You can respond here to the blogs, or you can write me directly at: njk@kycouncilofchurches.org.

Thanks for reading. In hope always for unity, justice, and peace, Nancy Jo

Hanging around the premises, or standing-and moving--with the promises?

The Church as God's missionary people

The focus on mission at the 58th annual assembly of the Kentucky Council of Churches was intentional: the modern ecumenical movement began with the world missionary conference held in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1910. The International Missionary Conference brought together church leaders from around the world because, during the great 19th century expansion of Christianity into Africa, Asia, and South America, the missionaries had encountered great difficulty in communicating the gospel due to the divisions within the church: the churches were competing with one another; their competition was itself a reason for people to reject the Gospel, because clearly, if the Gospel was one of reconciliation, these missionaries were not reconciled with one another. They were not living the story they proclaimed.

In May of 2005, the WCC called together the 13th international Conference on World Mission and Evangelism. At that conference, the participants concentrated on the new challenges that come from the need for reconciliation between East and West, North and South, and between Christians and people of other faiths. They declared again their painful awareness of the mistakes of the past, and prayed that the churches may learn from them.

The Council returned to this basic concern about mission. We gathered as churches in a nation where 85% of our people say that they are Christians, and yet we are more divided than ever before. The Kentucky Council of Churches was founded in response to the great prayer of Jesus, that his followers might be one, "in order that the world might believe."

But believe what? Is the purpose of the church to save souls, converting them to accept the substitutionary atonement of Christ's death on a cross for the guilt and sins of the world? And if we save souls, what then? What does a saved soul do?

Is the Church not also called to convert people from a self-centered materialism to be followers of Jesus Christ, in this life, with implications not merely for the eternal state of their souls, but also for the state of their civic and social lives? Are we not called to testify to the love of God and our call to love our neighbors as ourselves? Do we have any responsibility to one another that would hold us to accountability to the Gospel that Jesus proclaimed, a gospel of a kingdom, a "kin_dom", the reign of God breaking into this world and all its political, economic, and social structures?

When John's disciples came to Jesus to ask him if he was the one they were to expect, Jesus didn't say: I am the one whose death will guarantee eternal life for all who believe. He said: Go and tell John what you see: the lame walk, the deaf can hear, the blind see, the hungry are fed.

I think many of us worry that too much of Christianity in our Commonwealth is portrayed as moralistic, rather than moral, as judgmental rather than transformative, as narrow and petty rather than generous of mind and heart; as only private rather than also including our public life.

We are called to be proclaimers, meaning to "claim-for". What are we to proclaim, to claim for? For the way of Jesus whom we profess to be way, and truth, and life. We are witnesses, witnesses to the way of Jesus. Witnesses do not keep silent. They speak. They act. They break noisily into deadly silences. A witness must be, in some unalterable way, always public, or it is no witness at all.

To witness is surely to tell the old, old story of Jesus and his love, and it is to tell the story in deeds of kindness and generosity as well as in words--but not to coerce others with that story. Jesus never coerced anyone into following him, nor did he perform magic tricks to make them believe, nor did he say that following him would make life be a life without struggles, suffering, only that in that life there would be joy without measure, hope without end, and love without fail. His love was never exclusive, always inclusive, never belittling or demeaning, always transforming.

Those adjectives are important for they form the basis of what we understand to be the good and just society. To witness is to engage the loveless powers and principalities of evil with the powerful love that creates good. To witness is to DO the actions that will heal and transform a broken world, in the name of the one we follow. Our task is not just to give the poor some money and send them out of our way, as the disciples wanted to do when that crowd of 5000 had gathered. No, Jesus says, YOU feed them.

For too many people, the Church has become an end in itself, the purpose or goal of the Gospel. The Church of Jesus Christ is not the purpose or goal of the Gospel, but rather its instrument and witness. Mission is not just a program of the church. Mission is what defines church as God's "sent" people. Either we are defined by mission, or we reduce the scope of the gospel and the mandate of the church. Our challenge, if we are to claim people for Christ, is to see that the issues of our time are not only matters about which we disagree, but are the frontiers for planting God's vision for creation. As one of our former Council officers, the Rev. Leticia Rouser, used to say: we've got to quit hanging around the premises, and start standing--and moving--on the promises.

Michael Kinnamon suggested at that International Conference on World Mission and Evanglism in Athens in May that "an ecumenical movement that doesn't involve conversations between people who disagree would not be an ecumenical movement." Let us be clear: we are NOT here because we agree. We disagree about methodologies, and reasons for evanglization and mission. We do not, however, disagree, about the fact that mission is essential to the very essence of what it means to be church.

From my perspective, looking at all our churches, and reflecting on our common life together as Christians in Kentucky, I see lots of evidence at the local level of people alive with and excited for mission. Sadly, I also see a lot of churches that are focusing more on serving the people in the pews, making their lives stress free, comfortable. I see our denominations distracted by moral issues that have to do with the more personal and intimate concerns of our humanity--which is not to say that doing the hard work of ethical reflection about those issues is unimportant. But it is to say that we seem to have too little to say about the major social moral issues of our time: the new growing threat of nuclear proliferation and the fact that nuclear weapons can only be understood as weapons of genocide and weapons that terrorists will one day use, unless we begin to get busy destroying them; about the use of pre-emptive warfare to intervene in some places where people are oppressed or pose a threat, but not in others; about tax cuts for the rich while services to our children, our poor, our elderly are slashed; about our profligate use of fossil fuels and what it is doing to the environment; about the unrelenting scourge of racism even as we mourn the death of one of the great icons of the civil rights movement; about the poverty that afflicts as many as 20% of our children; about the fact that Kentucky produces more marijuana, and probably has more Meth addicts than 49 other states in these United States; that the numbers of people without health insurance keeps increasing; and that the health of our people-the physical health of people who also sit in our pews-is deteriorating to the point that we are #1 in lung cancer; #4 in obesity; #2 in diabetes in this state-just to mention a few ugly statistics.

The Church is the servant of God's reign, of God's kin_dom. It exists to serve the world whom God sent Christ to save, not to be served. If we are serving only what makes us feel good, that narcissistic style of being church numbs us to the disasters taking place in world events and city streets around us. If it makes us feel self-righteous and comfortable, then the church is asking God to serve it, and it has missed its high calling.