So Little Saigon opposes a casino? Don’t bet on it

What was that the other night at the Garden Grove City Council meeting?

Was it proof of a mature Vietnamese American voting bloc, demonstrating political involvement in the best traditions of local politics?

Or was it a petulant crowd of self-appointed moral police, purporting to speak for the larger community while occasionally threatening council members with ouster if they didn’t do their bidding and shoot down a casino proposal?

At night’s end, the council voted 5-0 to move ahead on an upscale hotel/commercial project on Harbor Boulevard, nixing the competing casino proposal that it said had too many loose ends.

But the real story wasn’t about a hotel project. Not while a throng of Vietnamese Americans showed up en masse, some bearing signs about casinos destroying lives and offering poignant stories to that effect.

The audience spilled over into three other meeting rooms. At mid-evening, roughly 175 people were at City Hall, the overwhelming majority of Vietnamese heritage and opposed to any notion of putting a casino in Garden Grove. “Put it back in the trash can, once and for all!” one man said with feeling, referring to city’s on-again, off-again flirtation with the casino idea.

From my observation, the anti-casino faction appeared to be composed largely of people over 40. During the two hours I sat in on the meeting, speaker after speaker detailed the problems gambling had caused among people they knew. They implored the council not to let the scourge into their city. Yet none of the speakers I heard offered statistical evidence to support their claims of a casino’s deleterious effects on a city.

Meanwhile, study after study has shown that casinos can bring in significant revenue to a city.

For the record, I’m neutral on the issue. I like the casino atmosphere, but I’m not a gambler.

Under the broad umbrella of a “moral” argument, I understand why people oppose casinos. But I won’t cede them the moral high ground to the extent they want it.

First, if a person believes that gambling is bad, there’s a clear option: Don’t go to the casino.

Second, why should a belief that gambling is a social evil drive a city’s decision on whether to build a casino? What if the belief, while strongly held, is wrong?

We all know who’s pulling the slots or shooting craps at Las Vegas casinos. They’re farmers from Iowa. Insurance agents from Colorado. Teachers from California.

Society’s degenerates? That’s a tough sell.

Still, the numbers in Garden Grove were impressive. Someone has mobilized the troops.

But do they represent a powerful voting bloc that seems to revel in suggestions of electoral power? Or is the anti-casino group a mirage?

I discussed the issue Friday with a Vietnamese American man in his late 20s. Once upon a time, he’d have been called a yuppie -- young urban professional. He’s grown up in Little Saigon and asked not to be identified because he doesn’t want to be connected to the casino issue -- about which, he says, he’s ambivalent.

He says gambling is “infectious” in Little Saigon. “Growing up,” he says, “I don’t know of any family who doesn’t know a gambler or a person who has fallen because of gambling.”

That captures the duality of the issue in Little Saigon, he says. Vietnamese like to gamble -- an activity virtually endemic to their culture -- and as a result have seen its harmful effects on some people.

He says the interest in gambling is not so much to strike it rich as it is to relax after a typically hard-working daily life that characterizes the community. It’s as if, he says, Vietnamese see hard work “as their sacrifice, so they deserve to go to a casino.”

Were the council protesters representative of the Vietnamese American community?

The second- and third-generation Vietnamese, he jokes, have a saying about their elders: “Let the old people talk, we don’t care; but old people don’t talk for us. The consensus is that we don’t think they speak for us all.”

He says that “if you polled Little Saigon directly, it would be overwhelmingly yes for a casino.”

As of last Tuesday, the casino question is dead again in Garden Grove.

Like I said, I really don’t care.

But the scamp in me keeps thinking: Wouldn’t it be quite the irony if, contrary to popular perception, most of its residents would like to see a glittering gaming palace on Harbor Boulevard?

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at [email protected]. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.