From Press Herald
Wanting to restrict how people spend their money
is at odds with defenses of rights.
I do not understand why many liberals who favor legalizing marijuana, oppose censorship of hard-core pornography, support the right of terminally ill, pain-wracked people to assisted suicide and pride themselves on their belief in individuals’ rights to govern their own lives become vehement prohibitionists when it comes to gambling.
Of course opposition to repealing laws that make it criminal for adults to make bets with their own money is not confined to people on the left. The most important law protecting America from the grave threat of grown men and women playing poker on the Internet came to us thanks to the right.
In 2006, the U.S. House passed this bill over the objections of a few of us — most vocally Ron Paul and me. It was not widely expected even to come up in the Senate. But Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist was planning to run for president in 2008, and he sought to increase support from religious conservatives, an important element of the Republican primary electorate. So he used his leverage to add the House prohibition to an unrelated bill that had to pass. There was no Senate vote.
I am not an expert on Republican primary dynamics, so this might have helped him, but we’ll never know because another Frist legislative effort that pleased religious conservatives outraged the rest of the country. This was his leadership in enacting the law overruling the decision of Terri Schiavo’s husband, which he has said reflected her previously expressed wishes, to stop the feedings that kept her breathing but with no other sign of life.
