South Jersey is home to Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, one of the finest military installations in the world, and it was my honor to represent the base and all of those who serve there.

After a great deal of thought and discussions with my family, I have decided not to seek re-election in 2014. Politics shouldn't be a career, and I never intended to make it one.

I always step back and look at - you know, look at my background in playing team sports my whole life and taking that approach into Congress. It's not about me going, and you know, feeding my ego going to Congress.

When I decided to run for Congress, I saw it as an opportunity to serve the South Jersey community that had become my home after signing to play for the Philadelphia Eagles. I didn't choose public service out of political ambition or a desire for power, and never once thought of making a career of it.

How any government could promote the Vardy academies in the North-East of England is absolutely beyond me. Tony Blair defends them on grounds of diversity, but it should be unthinkable in the 21st century to have a school whose head of science believes the world is less than 10,000 years old.

My parents never forced things on my brother and me: not our faith, not our sports, not our friends. Yet they taught us about surrounding ourselves with the right people: the kind of people we want to be.

In 2010, the Spanish constitutional court annulled a large part of the Catalan statute of autonomy negotiated between Catalonia and the previous prime minister, Jose Luis Zapatero. This demolished one of the main agreements achieved during the Spanish transition to democracy - Catalonia's recovery of self-governance.

I'm going to try and make people realize that in order to live the life they are living, they need to have democracy, and it's being threatened.