Arkansas Lottery Rolls Out More Scratch-Off Games

Last week the Arkansas Lottery rolled out four new lines of scratch-off tickets selling for anywhere from $1 to $10 each.

We have written time and again about how scratch-off tickets prey on the poor and desperate.

A 2015 study in Canada found a link between problem gambling and instant lottery tickets, writing,

It is possible that problem gamblers are more attracted to instant win tickets than lottery tickets because instant win tickets provide immediate feedback. Some authors have even described instant win tickets as “paper slot machines” (Griffiths, 2002). Therefore, instant win tickets might be considered a more exciting form of lottery gambling, which may help explain why it attracts a different type of gambler than [ordinary] lottery tickets do. 

A 2018 study published in the Journal of Behavioral Addictions also found a link between how often a person played scratch-off tickets and the severity of a person’s gambling problem.

Despite all of this, the Arkansas Lottery continues to roll out new scratch-off tickets every month and budgets nearly 71% of its revenue for prizes in an ongoing effort to prop up lottery ticket sales.

Trust the Experts? Harvard Says Men Can Have Babies

Recently, Harvard Medical School hosted a panel discussion on Maternal Health. The topic was why women of color are statistically three times more likely to die during pregnancy or childbirth than white moms.

Throughout this event, talking about pregnancy and childbirth, every one of the panelists refused to use the word “woman.” On Twitter, the event was described as confronting problems faced by “pregnant and birthing people.” After wide backlash, they tweeted again: “Our panelists used this language because not all who give birth identify as women.”

The real tragedy here is that healthcare disparity for moms of color is a real problem. But if medical health experts refuse to acknowledge that the term woman refers to something that exists in reality, and that medical science itself depends on these biological realities, how can we expect them to solve an issue as complicated as ethnic health disparities?

Copyright 2020 by the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. Reprinted from BreakPoint.org with permission.