Bruised Reed

Politics | Ralph Reed is not accused of doing anything illegal, but will a penchant for not divulging connections come back to haunt | Jamie Dean

Every weekend in Philadelphia, Miss., hundreds of chip-laden fortune-seekers huddle around some 3,000 slot machines and 70 card tables under the neon glow of the Silver Star Casino on the Choctaw Indian Reservation. The Silver Star is one of two casinos on the tribe's property in central Mississippi that prove the adage that the house always wins: The Choctaw gaming enterprise raked in nearly $300 million last year.

Ralph Reed has publicly called that kind of enterprise "a cancer on the American body politic." Mr. Reed—former executive director of the Christian Coalition, now president of the Century Strategies consulting firm and a candidate for lieutenant governor of Georgia—has also publicly rallied evangelical Christians for years to protest legalized gambling on both federal and state levels, calling the practice immoral.