Senators Use Tired Reasoning to Oppose Delaware Sports Gambling
Unable to break free of their closed mindsets that refuse to admit logic or reason, US Senators Jon Kyl and Orrin Hatch attacked Delaware's use of a grandfather clause provided by Congress to legalize sports gambling. Despite the adherence to the wording of the federal law banning sports betting by Delaware, the legislators from Utah and Arizona insisted the US Department of Justice should become involved.
The two Senators sent a letter to US Attorney General Eric Holder asking that the DoJ "monitor closely the situation in Delaware to ensure the state's compliance with federal law."
The lawmakers contend that the 1992 Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, which granted Delaware and Nevada, Oregon, and Montana an exemption from a ban on sports gambling because those states had previously allowed such betting, does not allow for any sports wagering beyond what had previously existed.
The Senators claim legal sports gambling in Delaware involving bets on individual games would "threaten to greatly expand sports gambling and undermine the integrity of our" sports organizations, despite the existence of legal sports gambling in Nevada, which has not been found to hurt sports in the ways described.
The legislators also ignore the vast and booming black market on sports betting, which many have said is far more harmful to integrity than any regulated and legal operation. And the insistence that betting on single games is far worse than parlay betting, which even Hatch and Kyl acknowledge is within Delaware's rights, follows no logic whatsoever.
Delaware Governor Jack Markell said that the state statute was reviewed and approved as legal by the Delaware Supreme Court, and any action should involve state courts, not Senators far from their home states.
