For reasons that have never really been clear to me, the religious right has consistently opposed gambling in nearly all of its forms. And yet, a few of the movement’s biggest leaders have had some personal trouble with the issue over the years.<\/p>\n
Best-selling compiler Bob Bennett is widely known for his expensive gambling habits<\/a>. Less well known is that Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson purchased two race horses<\/a> in 2002 despite his group’s crusade against legalized gambling.<\/p>\n And, as several sites<\/a> have mentioned over the last couple of days, Robertson’s former right-hand man at the Christian Coalition, Ralph Reed, has been caught up in a major gaming industry scandal<\/a>.<\/p>\n When Ralph Reed was the boyish director of the Christian Coalition, he made opposition to gambling a major plank in his “family values” agenda, calling gambling “a cancer on the American body politic” that was “stealing food from the mouths of children.” But now, a broad federal investigation into lobbying abuses connected to gambling on Indian reservations has unearthed evidence that Reed has been surreptitiously working for an Indian tribe with a large casino it sought to protect–and that Reed was paid with funds laundered through two firms to try to keep his lucrative involvement secret.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Oops.<\/p>\n