Sports gambling seems to be everywhere, especially when watching or listening to sports — both collegiate and professional. In fact, during March Madness season, nearly 68 million Americans are expected to wager over $15 billion on the NCAA basketball tournament.
Yet few people besides key stakeholders with lots of money to make are paying attention to how the legal landscape of sports gambling is unfolding in our state capitols since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the federal Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA), allowing states to create their own regulatory frameworks around sports gambling.
This issue, often playing out behind the scenes, is already repeating both the predatory aspects of the Big Tobacco scandal while exacerbating addiction like the opioid crisis. In the next 10 years, it is predicted to absorb 1 trillion dollars in revenue. More and more people are calling legalization a huge mistake.
Fortunately, one Catholic, Les Bernal, is serving as a resource to those working to prevent more people from being victimized. Bernal is the national director of Stop Predatory Gambling, a national advocacy organization that is exposing the harms of online sports gambling. He recently joined my OSV podcast, Catholic in America, to explain why he is so passionate about gambling.
In the years since PASPA, 39 states and the District of Columbia have legalized sports gambling in some form. Some states allow sports gambling at physical sites, such as tribal casinos. Others allow it online as well through apps such as DraftKings or MGM.
Predatory gambling, according to Bernal, is not church bingo, a friendly poker game, meat raffles, or even office pool NCAA tournament brackets. There is no “house,” and these are private, social forms of gambling. Even horse racing is called pari-mutuel betting, where people bet against others.
What sports gambling legalization does, according to Bernal, is to create a partnership between the state and the gambling industry for commercial sportsbooks to operate. In his words, it is state-sanctioned consumer financial fraud and taxation through exploitation.
“The longer you participate in it, there is a mathematical guarantee that you will lose all your money,” says Bernal. And with online sports gambling, he notes, not only are we putting Las Vegas on Main Street, we are putting it in everyone’s pocket via their cell phone.
In a recent study of 700,000 online sports gamblers, fewer than 5 percent withdrew more money than they put in. And if you are skilled at sports betting or know how to beat the algorithm, you can get kicked off the platform. In fact, underscoring the predatory nature of the industry, veteran gamblers will exhibit addictive behavior such as checking their bets at all hours of the night so that companies will put bonus cash in their accounts. It’s a good way to “zero out” (in industry parlance) those who are more likely to spend (and, therefore, lose) money.
The house really does always win.
According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church (No. 2413), “[g]ames of chance (card games, etc.) or wagers 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. The passion for gambling risks becoming an enslavement.”
Already, the evidence is coming in that legalized sports gambling is doing just that.
The data shows that calls to gambling helplines in Virginia rose 387 percent after the first year of legalization. In New Jersey, it is believed 6 percent of residents now have a gambling disorder. And a recent commission of 22 academic experts convened by the medical journal The Lancet concluded that existing studies and surveys demonstrate that gambling’s prevalence poses a significant threat to public health.
A 2024 Bloomberg article, “Sports Betting Apps Are Even More Toxic Than You Thought,” summarized the data of how sports betting is impacting the financial health of Americans. In states that allow online betting, the average credit score drops by almost 1 percent while the likelihood of bankruptcy increases by 28 percent and the amount of debt sent to collection agencies increases by 8 percent.
Buttressed by the evidence pouring in after PASPA was struck down, Catholics should follow Bernal’s lead and see this issue as one of major concern in our protection of the poor and vulnerable. We need to shed light on the harms of the deals that continue to be brokered among politicians and moneyed gambling interests.
In states where sports gambling has not been legalized, strong efforts should be made to oppose it. In places where it has been legalized in some form, it should be prevented from further expanding, especially online.
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