CHARLESTON — Although he helped send the casino gambling bill to the Senate floor Thursday, Sen. Shirley Love says he felt a sense of “shame” over the apathy evidenced by the lack of a massive turnout by churches to protest the issue.

Love was responding to an accusation by West Virginia Family Foundation Director Kevin McCoy that he “sold out” the conservative Christian group on the four-county gambling option bill.

Love, D-Fayette, earlier signed a questionnaire saying he was opposed to expansion of gambling, specifically table games in Jefferson, Ohio, Hancock and Kanawha counties, McCoy said.

To Love, it was a matter of semantics, saying he opposes casino gambling but supports the idea of local referendums.

“This does not say they can gamble,” he said of the bill shipped out by the Senate Finance Committee. “This bill says those four counties have an opportunity to vote on this issue.”

Love said the questionnaire by McCoy’s group simply asked, “Do you support casino gambling, including riverboat gambling?”

“And I don’t,” the senator said. “This is not a vote on gambling. This bill is to allow a local referendum.”

He blamed the absence of the faithful for not turning out in big numbers as others do, such as nurses, doctors or labor groups to back or defeat a particular matter.

“When I looked in this Capitol this morning, when this issue came up in Finance, this Capitol should have been full and overflowing and outside waiting to get in with different denominations that should have been here,” Love said.

“They should have had the halls full. If it had been pay raise for teachers, or some kind of labor issue, or doctors warning about moving out of the state of West Virginia, you couldn’t get through the halls. Today, you couldn’t find three or four ministers.”

A large showing by opponents would have prompted Finance to cancel its work on the gambling bill, he said.

“I felt ashamed, and they should feel ashamed that there wasn’t any opposition to this,” he said.

“These halls should have been full. If you drive up these hollows, you’ll find one beer joint, and you drive 5 miles, you’ll find 20 churches.”

McCoy also claimed Sen. Karen Facemyer, R-Jackson, the lead sponsor on a similar gambling bill in the Senate, betrayed the family foundation.

“We feel that he (Love) sold us down the river,” McCoy said. “We thought it was very interesting how they used seniors as a tool to try to bring support for the bill. We hope and pray that this will be a loud and clear message to the seniors to not allow their group to be used as a tool and a pawn to promote the expansion of gambling in the future.”

Love said Greenbrier County clergymen thanked him in the aftermath of that county’s rejection by a 2-to-1 margin seven years ago, albeit the opposition spent a mere $10,000 contrasted to The Greenbrier’s lavish $2.2 million campaign.

Back then, Love said, churches organized their opposition, compared to a sense of indifference in this year’s casino gambling controversy, or at least it appeared that way by the number of opponents arriving at the Capitol when it was debated.

Love said it appeared only some Methodists opposed the gambling, but others — Baptists, Presbyterians and Catholics — should have been involved.

When a war is on, he added, “you can’t just send the generals to the front.”

— E-mail: mannix@register-herald.com