cholesterol

By Dr. Mercola

Cholesterol could easily be described as the smoking gun of the last two decades. It's been responsible for demonizing entire categories of foods (like eggs and saturated fats) and blamed for just about every case of heart disease in the last 20 years.

Yet when I first opened my medical practice in the mid-80s, cholesterol, and the fear that yours was too high was rarely talked about. Somewhere along the way however, cholesterol became a household word -- something that you must keep as low as possible, or suffer the consequences.

You are probably aware that there are many myths that portray fat and cholesterol as one of the worst foods you can consume. Please understand that these myths are actually harming your health. Not only is cholesterol most likely notgoing to destroy your health (as you have been led to believe), but it is also not the cause of heart disease.

And for those of you taking cholesterol-lowering drugs, the information that follows could not have been given to you fast enough. But before I delve into this life-changing information, let's get some basics down first.

What Is Cholesterol, and Why Do You Need It?

That's right, you do need cholesterol.

This soft, waxy substance is found not only in your bloodstream, but also in every cell in your body, where it helps to produce cell membranes, hormones, vitamin D and bile acids that help you to digest fat. Cholesterol also helps in the formation of your memories and is vital for neurological function.

Your liver makes about 75 percent of your body's cholesterol,1 and according to conventional medicine, there are two types:

1. High-density lipoprotein or HDL: This is the "good" cholesterol that helps keep cholesterol away from your arteries and remove any excess from arterial plaque, which may help to prevent heart disease.
2. Low-density lipoprotein or LDL: This "bad" cholesterol circulates in your blood and, according to conventional thinking, may build up in your arteries, forming plaque that makes your arteries narrow and less flexible (a condition called atherosclerosis). If a clot forms in one of these narrowed arteries leading to your heart or brain, a heart attack or stroke may result.

Also making up your total cholesterol count are:

• Triglycerides: Elevated levels of this dangerous fat have been linked to heart disease and diabetes. Triglyceride levels are known to rise from eating too many grains and sugars, being physically inactive, smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol excessively and being overweight or obese.
• Lipoprotein (a), or Lp(a): Lp(a) is a substance that is made up of an LDL "bad cholesterol" part plus a protein (apoprotein a). Elevated Lp(a) levels are a very strong risk factor for heart disease. This has been well established, yet very few physicians check for it in their patients.

Understand this:

Your Total Cholesterol Level Is NOT a Great Indicator of Your Heart Disease Risk

Health officials in the United States urge everyone over the age of 20 to have their cholesterol tested once every five years. Part of this test is your total cholesterol, or the sum of your blood's cholesterol content, including HDL, LDLs, and VLDLs.

The American Heart Association recommends that your total cholesterol should be less than 200 mg/dL, but what they do not tell you is that total cholesterol level is just about worthless in determining your risk for heart disease, unless it is above 300.

In addition, the AHA updated their guidelines in 2004, lowering the recommended level of LDL cholesterol from 130 to LDL to less than 100, or even less than 70 for patients at very high risk.

In order to achieve these outrageous and dangerously low targets, you typically need to take multiple cholesterol-lowering drugs. So the guidelines instantly increased the market for these dangerous drugs. Now, with testing children'scholesterol levels, they're increasing their market even more.

I have seen a number of people with total cholesterol levels over 250 who actually were at low heart disease risk due to their HDL levels. Conversely, I have seen even more who had cholesterol levels under 200 that were at a very high risk of heart disease based on the following additional tests:

• HDL/Cholesterol ratio
• Triglyceride/HDL ratio

HDL percentage is a very potent heart disease risk factor. Just divide your HDL level by your cholesterol. That ratio should ideally be above 24 percent. You can also do the same thing with your triglycerides and HDL ratio. That ratio should be below 2.

Keep in mind, however, that these are still simply guidelines, and there's a lot more that goes into your risk of heart disease than any one of these numbers. In fact, it was only after word got out that total cholesterol is a poor predictor of heart disease that HDL and LDL cholesterol were brought into the picture. They give you a closer idea of what's going on, but they still do not show you everything.

Cholesterol Is Neither 'Good' Nor 'Bad'

Now that we've defined good and bad cholesterol, it has to be said that there is actually only one type of cholesterol. Ron Rosedale, MD, who is widely considered to be the leading anti-aging doctor in the United States, does an excellent job of explaining this concept:2

"Notice please that LDL and HDL are lipoproteins -- fats combined with proteins. There is only one cholesterol. There is no such thing as 'good' or 'bad' cholesterol. Cholesterol is just cholesterol. It combines with other fats and proteins to be carried through the bloodstream, since fat and our watery blood do not mix very well. Fatty substances therefore must be shuttled to and from our tissues and cells using proteins. LDL and HDL are forms of proteins and are far from being just cholesterol.

In fact we now know there are many types of these fat and protein particles. LDL particles come in many sizes and large LDL particles are not a problem. Only the so-called small dense LDL particles can potentially be a problem, because they can squeeze through the lining of the arteries and if they oxidize, otherwise known as turning rancid, they can cause damage and inflammation.

Thus, you might say that there is 'good LDL' and 'bad LDL.' Also, some HDL particles are better than others. Knowing just your total cholesterol tells you very little. Even knowing your LDL and HDL levels will not tell you very much."

Cholesterol Is Your Friend, Not Your Enemy

Before we continue, I really would like you to get your mind around this concept. In the United States, the idea that cholesterol is evil is very much engrained in most people's minds. But this is a very harmful myth that needs to be put to rest right now.

"First and foremost," Dr. Rosedale points out, "cholesterol is a vital component of every cell membrane on Earth. In other words, there is no life on Earth that can live without cholesterol.That will automatically tell you that, in and of itself, it cannot be evil. In fact, it is one of our best friends. We would not be here without it. No wonder lowering cholesterol too much increases one's risk of dying. Cholesterol is also a precursor to all of the steroid hormones. You cannot make estrogen, testosterone, cortisone, and a host of other vital hormones without cholesterol."

Vitamin D and Your Cholesterol

You probably are aware of the incredible influence of vitamin D on your health. If you aren't, or need a refresher, you can visitmy vitamin D page. What most people do not realize is that the best way to obtain your vitamin D is from safe exposure to sun on your skin. The UVB rays in sunlight interact with the cholesterol on your skin and convert it to vitamin D. Bottom line? If your cholesterol level is too low you will not be able to use the sun to generate sufficient levels of vitamin D. Additionally, it provides some intuitive feedback that if cholesterol were so dangerous, why would your body use it as precursor for vitamin D and virtually all of the steroid hormones in your body? Other "evidence" that cholesterol is good for you?
Consider the role of "good" HDL cholesterol. Essentially, HDL takes cholesterol from your body's tissues and arteries, and brings it back to your liver, where most of your cholesterol is produced. If the purpose of this was to eliminate cholesterol from your body, it would make sense that the cholesterol would be shuttled back to your kidneys or intestines so your body could remove it.

Instead, it goes back to your liver. Why? Because your liver is going to reuse it. "It is taking it back to your liver so that your liver can recycle it; put it back into other particles to be taken to tissues and cells that need it," Dr. Rosedale explains. "Your body is trying to make and conserve the cholesterol for the precise reason that it is so important, indeed vital, for health."

Cholesterol and Inflammation - What's the Connection?

Inflammation has become a bit of a buzzword in the medical field because it has been linked to so many different diseases. And one of those diseases is heart disease... the same heart disease that cholesterol is often blamed for.

What am I getting at? Well, first consider the role of inflammation in your body. In many respects, it's a good thing as it's your body's natural response to invaders it perceives as threats. If you get a cut for instance, the process of inflammation is what allows you to heal. Specifically during inflammation:

• Your blood vessels constrict to keep you from bleeding to death
• Your blood becomes thicker so it can clot
• Your immune system sends cells and chemicals to fight viruses, bacteria and other "bad guys" that could infect the area
• Cells multiply to repair the damage

Ultimately, the cut is healed and a protective scar may form over the area. If your arteries are damaged, a very similar process occurs inside of your body, except that a "scar" in your artery is known as plaque. This plaque, along with the thickening of your blood and constricting of your blood vessels that normally occur during the inflammatory process, can indeed increase your risk of high blood pressure and heart attacks. Notice that cholesterol has yet to even enter the picture. Cholesterol comes in because, in order to replace your damaged cells, it is necessary.

Remember that no cell can form without it. So if you have a bunch of damaged cells that need to be replaced, your liver will be notified to make more cholesterol and release it into your bloodstream. This is a deliberate process that takes place in order for your body to produce new, healthy cells. It's also possible, and quite common, for damage to occur in your body on a regular basis. In this case, you will be in a dangerous state of chronic inflammation. The test usually used to determine if you have chronic inflammation is a C-reactive protein (CRP) blood test. CRP level is used as a marker of inflammation in your arteries. Generally speaking:

• A CRP level under 1 milligrams per liter of blood means you have a low risk for cardiovascular disease
• 1 to 3 milligrams means your risk is intermediate
• More than 3 milligrams is high risk

Even conventional medicine is warming up to the idea that chronic inflammation can trigger heart attacks. But they stop short of seeing the big picture. In the eyes of conventional medicine, when they see increased cholesterol circulating in your bloodstream, they conclude that it -- not the underlying damage to your arteries -- is the cause of heart attacks. Which brings me to my next point.

The Insanity of Lowering Cholesterol

Sally Fallon, the president of the Weston A. Price Foundation, and Mary Enig, Ph.D, an expert in lipid biochemistry, have gone so far as to call high cholesterol "an invented disease, a 'problem' that emerged when health professionals learned how to measure cholesterol levels in the blood."3 And this explanation is spot on. If you have increased levels of cholesterol, it is at least in part because of increased inflammation in your body. The cholesterol is there to do a job: help your body to heal and repair.

Conventional medicine misses the boat entirely when they dangerously recommend that lowering cholesterol with drugs is the way to reduce your risk of heart attacks, because what is actually needed is to address whatever is causing your body damage -- and leading to increased inflammation and then increased cholesterol. As Dr. Rosedale so rightly points out:

"If excessive damage is occurring such that it is necessary to distribute extra cholesterol through the bloodstream, it would not seem very wise to merely lower the cholesterol and forget about why it is there in the first place. It would seem much smarter to reduce the extra need for the cholesterol -- the excessive damage that is occurring, the reason for the chronic inflammation."

I'll discuss how to do this later in the report, but first let's take a look at the dangers of low cholesterol -- and how it came to be that cholesterol levels needed to be so low in the first place.

If Your Cholesterol Is Too Low...

All kinds of nasty things can happen to your body. Remember, every single one of your cells needs cholesterol to thrive -- including those in your brain. Perhaps this is why low cholesterol wreaks havoc on your psyche. One large study conducted by Dutch researchers found that men with chronically low cholesterol levels showed a consistently higher risk of having depressive symptoms.4 This may be because cholesterol affects the metabolism of serotonin, a substance involved in the regulation of your mood. On a similar note, Canadian researchers found that those in the lowest quarter of total cholesterol concentration had more than six times the risk of committing suicide as did those in the highest quarter.5

Dozens of studies also support a connection between low or lowered cholesterol levels and violent behavior, through this same pathway: lowered cholesterol levels may lead to lowered brain serotonin activity, which may, in turn, lead to increased violence and aggression.6 And one meta-analysis of over 41,000 patient records found that people who take statin drugs to lower their cholesterol as much as possible may have a higher risk of cancer,7 while other studies have linked low cholesterol to Parkinson's disease. What cholesterol level is too low? Brace yourself.

Probably any level much under 150 -- an optimum would be more like 200. Now I know what you are thinking: "But my doctor tells me my cholesterol needs to be under 200 to be healthy." Well let me enlighten you about how these cholesterol recommendations came to be. And I warn you, it is not a pretty story. This is a significant issue. I have seen large numbers of people who have their cholesterol lowered below 150, and there is little question in my mind that it is causing far more harm than any benefit they are receiving by lowering their cholesterol this low.

Who Decided What Cholesterol Levels Are Healthy or Harmful?

In 2004, the U.S. government's National Cholesterol Education Program panel advised those at risk for heart disease to attempt to reduce their LDL cholesterol to specific, very low, levels. Before 2004, a 130-milligram LDL cholesterol level was considered healthy. The updated guidelines, however, recommended levels of less than 100, or even less than 70 for patients at very high risk. Keep in mind that these extremely low targets often require multiple cholesterol-lowering drugs to achieve.

Fortunately, in 2006, a review in the Annals of Internal Medicine8 found that there is insufficient evidence to support the target numbers outlined by the panel. The authors of the review were unable to find research providing evidence that achieving a specific LDL target level was important in and of itself, and found that the studies attempting to do so suffered from major flaws. Several of the scientists who helped develop the guidelines even admitted that the scientific evidence supporting the less-than-70 recommendation was not very strong.

So how did these excessively low cholesterol guidelines come about? Eight of the nine doctors on the panel that developed the new cholesterol guidelines had been making money from the drug companies that manufacture statin cholesterol-lowering drugs.9 The same drugs that the new guidelines suddenly created a huge new market for in the United States. Coincidence? I think not. Now, despite the finding that there is absolutely NO evidence to show that lowering your LDL cholesterol to 100 or below is good for you, what do you think the American Heart Association STILL recommends? Lowering your LDL cholesterol levels to less than 100.10 And to make matters worse, the standard recommendation to get to that level almost always includes one or more cholesterol-lowering drugs.

The Dangers of Cholesterol-Lowering Medications

If you are concerned about your cholesterol levels, taking a drug should be your absolute last resort. And when I say last resort, I'm saying the odds are very high, greater than 100 to 1, that you don't need drugs to lower your cholesterol.

To put it another way, among the more than 20,000 patients who have come to my clinic, only four or five of them truly needed these drugs, as they had genetic challenges of familial hypercholesterolemia that required it.

Contrast this to what is going on in the general population. According to data from Medco Health Solutions Inc., more than half of insured Americans are taking drugs for chronic health conditions. And cholesterol-lowering medications are the second most common variety among this group, with nearly 15 percent of chronic medication users taking them (high blood pressure medications -- another vastly over-prescribed category -- were first).11

Disturbingly, as written in BusinessWeek early in 2008, "Some researchers have even suggested -- half-jokingly -- that the medications should be put in the water supply."12 Count yourself lucky that you probably do NOT need to take cholesterol-lowering medications, because these are some nasty little pills. Statin drugs work by inhibiting an enzyme in your liver that's needed to manufacture cholesterol. What is so concerning about this is that when you go tinkering around with the delicate workings of the human body, you risk throwing everything off kilter.

Case in point, "statin drugs inhibit not just the production of cholesterol, but a whole family of intermediary substances, many if not all of which have important biochemical functions in their own right," say Enig and Fallon. For starters, statin drugs deplete your body of Coenzyme Q10 (CoQ10), which is beneficial to heart health and muscle function. Because doctors rarely inform people of this risk and advise them to take a CoQ10 supplement, this depletion leads to fatigue, muscle weakness, soreness, and eventually heart failure.

Muscle pain and weakness, a condition called rhabdomyolysis, is actually the most common side effect of statin drugs, which is thought to occur because statins activate the atrogin-1 gene, which plays a key role in muscle atrophy.13 By the way, muscle pain and weakness may be an indication that your body tissues are actually breaking down -- a condition that can cause kidney damage. Statin drugs have also been linked to:

• An increased risk of polyneuropathy (nerve damage that causes pain in the hands and feet and trouble walking)
• Dizziness
• Cognitive impairment, including memory loss14
• A potential increased risk of cancer15
• Decreased function of the immune system16
• Depression
• Liver problems, including a potential increase in liver enzymes (so people taking statins must be regularly monitored for normal liver function)

And recently a possible association was found between statins and an increased risk of Lou Gehrig's disease.17 Other cholesterol-lowering drugs besides statins also have side effects, most notably muscle pain and weakness.

Are Cholesterol Drugs Even Effective?

With all of these risks, the drugs had better be effective, right? Well, even this is questionable. At least, it depends on how you look at it. Most cholesterol-lowering drugs can effectively lower your cholesterol numbers, but are they actually making you any healthier, and do they help prevent heart disease? Have you ever heard of the statistic known as NNT, or number needed to treat? I didn't think so. In fact, most doctors haven't either. And herein lies the problem. NNT answers the question: How many people have to take a particular drug to avoid one incidence of a medical issue (such as a heart attack)? For example, if a drug had an NNT of 50 for heart attacks, then 50 people have to take the drug in order to prevent one heart attack.

Easy enough, right? Well, drug companies would rather that you not focus on NNT, because when you do, you get an entirely different picture of their "miracle" drugs. Take, for instance, Pfizer's Lipitor, which is the most prescribed cholesterol medication in the world and has been prescribed to more than 26 million Americans.18 According to Lipitor's own Web site, Lipitor is clinically proven to lower bad cholesterol 39-60 percent, depending on the dose. Sounds fairly effective, right? Well, BusinessWeek actually did an excellent story on this very topic earlier this year,19 and they found the REAL numbers right on Pfizer's own newspaper ad for Lipitor.

Upon first glance, the ad boasts that Lipitor reduces heart attacks by 36 percent. But there is an asterisk. And when you follow the asterisk, you find the following in much smaller type: "That means in a large clinical study, 3% of patients taking a sugar pill or placebo had a heart attack compared to 2% of patients taking Lipitor."

What this means is that for every 100 people who took the drug over 3.3 years, three people on placebos, and two people on Lipitor, had heart attacks. That means that taking Lipitor resulted in just one fewer heart attack per 100 people. The NNT, in this case, is 100. One hundred people have to take Lipitor for more than three years to prevent one heart attack. And the other 99 people, well, they've just dished out hundreds of dollars and increased their risk of a multitude of side effects for nothing. So you can see how the true effectiveness of cholesterol drugs like Lipitor is hidden behind a smokescreen. Or in some cases, not hidden at all.

Zetia and Vytorin: No Medical Benefits

Early in 2008, it came out that Zetia, which works by inhibiting absorption of cholesterol from your intestines, and Vytorin, which is a combination of Zetia and Zocor (a statin drug), do not work. This was discovered AFTER the drugs acquired close to 20 percent of the U.S. market for cholesterol-lowering drugs. And also after close to 1 million prescriptions for the drugs were being written each week in the United States, bringing in close to $4 billion in 2007.20

It was only after the results of a trial by the drugs' makers, Merck and Schering-Plough, were released that this was found out. Never mind that the trial was completed in April 2006, and results were not released until January 2008. And it's no wonder the drug companies wanted to hide these results. While Zetia does lower cholesterol by 15 percent to 20 percent, trials did not show that it reduces heart attacks or strokes, or that it reduces plaques in arteries that can lead to heart problems.

The trial by the drugs' makers, which studied whether Zetia could reduce the growth of plaques, found that plaques grew nearly twice as fast in patients taking Zetia along with Zocor (Vytorin) than in those taking Zocor alone.21 Of course, the answer is not to turn back to typical statin drugs to lower your cholesterol, as many of the so-called experts would have you believe. You see, statins are thought to have a beneficial effect on inflammation in your body, thereby lowering your risk of heart attack and stroke.

But you can lower inflammation in your body naturally, without risking any of the numerous side effects of statin drugs. This should also explain why my guidelines for lowering cholesterol are identical to those to lower inflammation.

How to Lower Inflammation, and Thereby Your Risk of Heart Disease, Naturally

There is a major misconception that you must avoid foods like eggs and saturated fat to protect your heart. While it's true that fats from animal sources contain cholesterol, I've explained earlier in this article why this should not scare you -- but I'll explain even further here. This misguided principle is based on the "lipid hypothesis" -- developed in the 1950s by nutrition pioneer Ancel Keys -- that linked dietary fat to coronary heart disease. The nutrition community of that time completely accepted the hypothesis, and encouraged the public to cut out butter, red meat, animal fats, eggs, dairy and other "artery-clogging" fats from their diets -- a radical change at that time.

What you may not know is that when Keys published his analysis that claimed to prove the link between dietary fats and coronary heart disease, he selectively analyzed information from only six countries to prove his correlation, rather than comparing all the data available at the time -- from 22 countries. As a result of this "cherry-picked" data, government health organizations began bombarding the public with advice that has contributed to the diabetes and obesity epidemics going on today: eat a low-fat diet. Not surprisingly, numerous studies have actually shown that Keys' theory was wrong and saturated fats are healthy, including these studies from Fallon and Enig's classic article The Skinny on Fats:22

• A survey of South Carolina adults found no correlation of blood cholesterol levels with "bad" dietary habits, such as use of red meat, animal fats, fried foods, butter, eggs, whole milk, bacon, sausage and cheese.23
• A Medical Research Council survey showed that men eating butter ran half the risk of developing heart disease as those using margarine.24

Of course, as Americans cut out nutritious animal fats from their diets, they were left hungry. So they began eating more processed grains, more vegetable oils, and more high-fructose corn syrup, all of which are nutritional disasters. It is this latter type of diet that will eventually lead to increased inflammation, and therefore cholesterol, in your body. So don't let anyone scare you away from saturated fat anymore. Chronic inflammation is actually caused by a laundry list of items such as:

• Oxidized cholesterol (cholesterol that has gone rancid, such as that from overcooked, scrambled eggs)
• Eating lots of sugar and grains
• Eating foods cooked at high temperatures
• Eating trans fats
• A sedentary lifestyle
• Smoking
• Emotional stress

So to sum it all up, in order to lower your inflammation and cholesterol levels naturally, you must address the items on this list.

How to Lower Your Cholesterol Naturally...

1. Make sure you're getting plenty of high-quality, animal-based omega3-fats. I prefer those from krill oil. New research suggests that as little as 500 mg may lower your total cholesterol and triglycerides and will likely increase your HDL cholesterol.
2. Reduce, with the plan of eliminating, grains and sugars in your daily diet. It is especially important to eliminatedangerous sugars such as fructose. If your HDL/Cholesterol ratio is abnormal and needs to be improved it would also serve you well to virtually eliminate fruits from your diet, as that it also a source of fructose. Once your cholesterol improves you can gradually reintroduce it to levels that don't raise your cholesterol.
3. Eat the right foods for your nutritional type. You can learn your nutritional type by taking our FREE test.
4. Eat a good portion of your food raw.
5. Eat healthy, preferably raw, fats that correspond to your nutritional type. This includes:
• Olive and olive oil
• Coconut and coconut oil
• Organic raw dairy products (including butter, cream, sour cream, cheese, etc.)
• Avocados
• Raw nuts
• Seeds
• Eggs (lightly cooked with yolks intact or raw)
• Organic, grass-fed meats
6. Get the right amount of exercise, especially Peak Fitness type of exercise. When you exercise you increase your circulation and the blood flow throughout your body. The components of your immune system are also better circulated, which means your immune system has a better chance of fighting an illness before it has the opportunity to spread.
7. Avoid smoking and drinking excessive amounts of alcohol.
8. Address your emotional challenges. I particularly love the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) for stress management.

So there you have it; the reasons why high cholesterol is a worry that many of you simply do not need to have, along with a simple plan to optimize yours. If someone you love is currently taking cholesterol-lowering drugs, I urge you to share this information with them as well, and take advantage of the thousands of free pages of information on www.Mercola.com. For the majority of you reading this right now, there's no reason to risk your health with cholesterol-lowering drugs. With the plan I've just outlined, you'll achieve the cholesterol levels you were meant to have, along with the very welcome "side effects" of increased energy, mood and mental clarity.

Too good to be true? Hardly. For the vast majority of people, making a few lifestyle changes causes healthy cholesterol levels to naturally occur. As always, your health really is in your hands. Now it's up to you to take control -- and shape it into something great

MagnaCartaText

Free from known copyright restrictions

Full-text translation of the 1215 edition of Magna Carta

Clauses marked (+) are still valid under the charter of 1225, but with a few minor amendments. Clauses marked (*) were omitted in all later reissues of the charter. In the charter itself the clauses are not numbered, and the text reads continuously. The translation sets out to convey the sense rather than the precise wording of the original Latin.

JOHN, by the grace of God King of England, Lord of Ireland, Duke of Normandy and Aquitaine, and Count of Anjou, to his archbishops, bishops, abbots, earls, barons, justices, foresters, sheriffs, stewards, servants, and to all his officials and loyal subjects, Greeting.

KNOW THAT BEFORE GOD, for the health of our soul and those of our ancestors and heirs, to the honour of God, the exaltation of the holy Church, and the better ordering of our kingdom, at the advice of our reverend fathers Stephen, archbishop of Canterbury, primate of all England, and cardinal of the holy Roman Church, Henry archbishop of Dublin, William bishop of London, Peter bishop of Winchester, Jocelin bishop of Bath and Glastonbury, Hugh bishop of Lincoln, Walter bishop of Worcester, William bishop of Coventry, Benedict bishop of Rochester, Master Pandulf subdeacon and member of the papal household, Brother Aymeric master of the knighthood of the Temple in England, William Marshal earl of Pembroke, William earl of Salisbury, William earl of Warren, William earl of Arundel, Alan of Galloway constable of Scotland, Warin fitz Gerald, Peter fitz Herbert, Hubert de Burgh seneschal of Poitou, Hugh de Neville, Matthew fitz Herbert, Thomas Basset, Alan Basset, Philip Daubeny, Robert de Roppeley, John Marshal, John fitz Hugh, and other loyal subjects:

+ (1) FIRST, THAT WE HAVE GRANTED TO GOD, and by this present charter have confirmed for us and our heirs in perpetuity, that the English Church shall be free, and shall have its rights undiminished, and its liberties unimpaired. That we wish this so to be observed, appears from the fact that of our own free will, before the outbreak of the present dispute between us and our barons, we granted and confirmed by charter the freedom of the Church's elections - a right reckoned to be of the greatest necessity and importance to it - and caused this to be confirmed by Pope Innocent III. This freedom we shall observe ourselves, and desire to be observed in good faith by our heirs in perpetuity.

TO ALL FREE MEN OF OUR KINGDOM we have also granted, for us and our heirs for ever, all the liberties written out below, to have and to keep for them and their heirs, of us and our heirs:

(2) If any earl, baron, or other person that holds lands directly of the Crown, for military service, shall die, and at his death his heir shall be of full age and owe a 'relief', the heir shall have his inheritance on payment of the ancient scale of 'relief'. That is to say, the heir or heirs of an earl shall pay £100 for the entire earl's barony, the heir or heirs of a knight 100s. at most for the entire knight's 'fee', and any man that owes less shall pay less, in accordance with the ancient usage of 'fees'.

(3) But if the heir of such a person is under age and a ward, when he comes of age he shall have his inheritance without 'relief' or fine.

(4) The guardian of the land of an heir who is under age shall take from it only reasonable revenues, customary dues, and feudal services. He shall do this without destruction or damage to men or property. If we have given the guardianship of the land to a sheriff, or to any person answerable to us for the revenues, and he commits destruction or damage, we will exact compensation from him, and the land shall be entrusted to two worthy and prudent men of the same 'fee', who shall be answerable to us for the revenues, or to the person to whom we have assigned them. If we have given or sold to anyone the guardianship of such land, and he causes destruction or damage, he shall lose the guardianship of it, and it shall be handed over to two worthy and prudent men of the same 'fee', who shall be similarly answerable to us.

(5) For so long as a guardian has guardianship of such land, he shall maintain the houses, parks, fish preserves, ponds, mills, and everything else pertaining to it, from the revenues of the land itself. When the heir comes of age, he shall restore the whole land to him, stocked with plough teams and such implements of husbandry as the season demands and the revenues from the land can reasonably bear.

(6) Heirs may be given in marriage, but not to someone of lower social standing. Before a marriage takes place, it shall be made known to the heir's next-of-kin.

(7) At her husband's death, a widow may have her marriage portion and inheritance at once and without trouble. She shall pay nothing for her dower, marriage portion, or any inheritance that she and her husband held jointly on the day of his death. She may remain in her husband's house for forty days after his death, and within this period her dower shall be assigned to her.

(8) No widow shall be compelled to marry, so long as she wishes to remain without a husband. But she must give security that she will not marry without royal consent, if she holds her lands of the Crown, or without the consent of whatever other lord she may hold them of.

(9) Neither we nor our officials will seize any land or rent in payment of a debt, so long as the debtor has movable goods sufficient to discharge the debt. A debtor's sureties shall not be distrained upon so long as the debtor himself can discharge his debt. If, for lack of means, the debtor is unable to discharge his debt, his sureties shall be answerable for it. If they so desire, they may have the debtor's lands and rents until they have received satisfaction for the debt that they paid for him, unless the debtor can show that he has settled his obligations to them.

* (10) If anyone who has borrowed a sum of money from Jews dies before the debt has been repaid, his heir shall pay no interest on the debt for so long as he remains under age, irrespective of whom he holds his lands. If such a debt falls into the hands of the Crown, it will take nothing except the principal sum specified in the bond.

* (11) If a man dies owing money to Jews, his wife may have her dower and pay nothing towards the debt from it. If he leaves children that are under age, their needs may also be provided for on a scale appropriate to the size of his holding of lands. The debt is to be paid out of the residue, reserving the service due to his feudal lords. Debts owed to persons other than Jews are to be dealt with similarly.

* (12) No 'scutage' or 'aid' may be levied in our kingdom without its general consent, unless it is for the ransom of our person, to make our eldest son a knight, and (once) to marry our eldest daughter. For these purposes only a reasonable 'aid' may be levied. 'Aids' from the city of London are to be treated similarly.

+ (13) The city of London shall enjoy all its ancient liberties and free customs, both by land and by water. We also will and grant that all other cities, boroughs, towns, and ports shall enjoy all their liberties and free customs.

* (14) To obtain the general consent of the realm for the assessment of an 'aid' - except in the three cases specified above - or a 'scutage', we will cause the archbishops, bishops, abbots, earls, and greater barons to be summoned individually by letter. To those who hold lands directly of us we will cause a general summons to be issued, through the sheriffs and other officials, to come together on a fixed day (of which at least forty days notice shall be given) and at a fixed place. In all letters of summons, the cause of the summons will be stated. When a summons has been issued, the business appointed for the day shall go forward in accordance with the resolution of those present, even if not all those who were summoned have appeared.

* (15) In future we will allow no one to levy an 'aid' from his free men, except to ransom his person, to make his eldest son a knight, and (once) to marry his eldest daughter. For these purposes only a reasonable 'aid' may be levied.

(16) No man shall be forced to perform more service for a knight's 'fee', or other free holding of land, than is due from it.

(17) Ordinary lawsuits shall not follow the royal court around, but shall be held in a fixed place.

(18) Inquests of novel disseisin, mort d'ancestor, and darrein presentment shall be taken only in their proper county court. We ourselves, or in our absence abroad our chief justice, will send two justices to each county four times a year, and these justices, with four knights of the county elected by the county itself, shall hold the assizes in the county court, on the day and in the place where the court meets.

(19) If any assizes cannot be taken on the day of the county court, as many knights and freeholders shall afterwards remain behind, of those who have attended the court, as will suffice for the administration of justice, having regard to the volume of business to be done.

(20) For a trivial offence, a free man shall be fined only in proportion to the degree of his offence, and for a serious offence correspondingly, but not so heavily as to deprive him of his livelihood. In the same way, a merchant shall be spared his merchandise, and a villein the implements of his husbandry, if they fall upon the mercy of a royal court. None of these fines shall be imposed except by the assessment on oath of reputable men of the neighbourhood.

(21) Earls and barons shall be fined only by their equals, and in proportion to the gravity of their offence.

(22) A fine imposed upon the lay property of a clerk in holy orders shall be assessed upon the same principles, without reference to the value of his ecclesiastical benefice.

(23) No town or person shall be forced to build bridges over rivers except those with an ancient obligation to do so.

(24) No sheriff, constable, coroners, or other royal officials are to hold lawsuits that should be held by the royal justices.

* (25) Every county, hundred, wapentake, and tithing shall remain at its ancient rent, without increase, except the royal demesne manors.

(26) If at the death of a man who holds a lay 'fee' of the Crown, a sheriff or royal official produces royal letters patent of summons for a debt due to the Crown, it shall be lawful for them to seize and list movable goods found in the lay 'fee' of the dead man to the value of the debt, as assessed by worthy men. Nothing shall be removed until the whole debt is paid, when the residue shall be given over to the executors to carry out the dead man’s will. If no debt is due to the Crown, all the movable goods shall be regarded as the property of the dead man, except the reasonable shares of his wife and children.

* (27) If a free man dies intestate, his movable goods are to be distributed by his next-of-kin and friends, under the supervision of the Church. The rights of his debtors are to be preserved.

(28) No constable or other royal official shall take corn or other movable goods from any man without immediate payment, unless the seller voluntarily offers postponement of this.

(29) No constable may compel a knight to pay money for castle-guard if the knight is willing to undertake the guard in person, or with reasonable excuse to supply some other fit man to do it. A knight taken or sent on military service shall be excused from castle-guard for the period of this service.

(30) No sheriff, royal official, or other person shall take horses or carts for transport from any free man, without his consent.

(31) Neither we nor any royal official will take wood for our castle, or for any other purpose, without the consent of the owner.

(32) We will not keep the lands of people convicted of felony in our hand for longer than a year and a day, after which they shall be returned to the lords of the 'fees' concerned.

(33) All fish-weirs shall be removed from the Thames, the Medway, and throughout the whole of England, except on the sea coast.

(34) The writ called precipe shall not in future be issued to anyone in respect of any holding of land, if a free man could thereby be deprived of the right of trial in his own lord's court.

(35) There shall be standard measures of wine, ale, and corn (the London quarter), throughout the kingdom. There shall also be a standard width of dyed cloth, russet, and haberject, namely two ells within the selvedges. Weights are to be standardised similarly.

(36) In future nothing shall be paid or accepted for the issue of a writ of inquisition of life or limbs. It shall be given gratis, and not refused.

(37) If a man holds land of the Crown by 'fee-farm', 'socage', or 'burgage', and also holds land of someone else for knight's service, we will not have guardianship of his heir, nor of the land that belongs to the other person's 'fee', by virtue of the 'fee-farm', 'socage', or 'burgage', unless the 'fee-farm' owes knight's service. We will not have the guardianship of a man's heir, or of land that he holds of someone else, by reason of any small property that he may hold of the Crown for a service of knives, arrows, or the like.

(38) In future no official shall place a man on trial upon his own unsupported statement, without producing credible witnesses to the truth of it.

+ (39) No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land.

+ (40) To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice.

(41) All merchants may enter or leave England unharmed and without fear, and may stay or travel within it, by land or water, for purposes of trade, free from all illegal exactions, in accordance with ancient and lawful customs. This, however, does not apply in time of war to merchants from a country that is at war with us. Any such merchants found in our country at the outbreak of war shall be detained without injury to their persons or property, until we or our chief justice have discovered how our own merchants are being treated in the country at war with us. If our own merchants are safe they shall be safe too.

* (42) In future it shall be lawful for any man to leave and return to our kingdom unharmed and without fear, by land or water, preserving his allegiance to us, except in time of war, for some short period, for the common benefit of the realm. People that have been imprisoned or outlawed in accordance with the law of the land, people from a country that is at war with us, and merchants - who shall be dealt with as stated above - are excepted from this provision.

(43) If a man holds lands of any 'escheat' such as the 'honour' of Wallingford, Nottingham, Boulogne, Lancaster, or of other 'escheats' in our hand that are baronies, at his death his heir shall give us only the 'relief' and service that he would have made to the baron, had the barony been in the baron's hand. We will hold the 'escheat' in the same manner as the baron held it.

(44) People who live outside the forest need not in future appear before the royal justices of the forest in answer to general summonses, unless they are actually involved in proceedings or are sureties for someone who has been seized for a forest offence.

* (45) We will appoint as justices, constables, sheriffs, or other officials, only men that know the law of the realm and are minded to keep it well.

(46) All barons who have founded abbeys, and have charters of English kings or ancient tenure as evidence of this, may have guardianship of them when there is no abbot, as is their due.

(47) All forests that have been created in our reign shall at once be disafforested. River-banks that have been enclosed in our reign shall be treated similarly.

*(48) All evil customs relating to forests and warrens, foresters, warreners, sheriffs and their servants, or river-banks and their wardens, are at once to be investigated in every county by twelve sworn knights of the county, and within forty days of their enquiry the evil customs are to be abolished completely and irrevocably. But we, or our chief justice if we are not in England, are first to be informed.

* (49) We will at once return all hostages and charters delivered up to us by Englishmen as security for peace or for loyal service.

* (50) We will remove completely from their offices the kinsmen of Gerard de Athée, and in future they shall hold no offices in England. The people in question are Engelard de Cigogné, Peter, Guy, and Andrew de Chanceaux, Guy de Cigogné, Geoffrey de Martigny and his brothers, Philip Marc and his brothers, with Geoffrey his nephew, and all their followers.

* (51) As soon as peace is restored, we will remove from the kingdom all the foreign knights, bowmen, their attendants, and the mercenaries that have come to it, to its harm, with horses and arms.

* (52) To any man whom we have deprived or dispossessed of lands, castles, liberties, or rights, without the lawful judgment of his equals, we will at once restore these. In cases of dispute the matter shall be resolved by the judgment of the twenty-five barons referred to below in the clause for securing the peace (§61). In cases, however, where a man was deprived or dispossessed of something without the lawful judgment of his equals by our father King Henry or our brother King Richard, and it remains in our hands or is held by others under our warranty, we shall have respite for the period commonly allowed to Crusaders, unless a lawsuit had been begun, or an enquiry had been made at our order, before we took the Cross as a Crusader. On our return from the Crusade, or if we abandon it, we will at once render justice in full.

* (53) We shall have similar respite in rendering justice in connexion with forests that are to be disafforested, or to remain forests, when these were first afforested by our father Henry or our brother Richard; with the guardianship of lands in another person's 'fee', when we have hitherto had this by virtue of a 'fee' held of us for knight's service by a third party; and with abbeys founded in another person's 'fee', in which the lord of the 'fee' claims to own a right. On our return from the Crusade, or if we abandon it, we will at once do full justice to complaints about these matters.

(54) No one shall be arrested or imprisoned on the appeal of a woman for the death of any person except her husband.

* (55) All fines that have been given to us unjustly and against the law of the land, and all fines that we have exacted unjustly, shall be entirely remitted or the matter decided by a majority judgment of the twenty-five barons referred to below in the clause for securing the peace (§61) together with Stephen, archbishop of Canterbury, if he can be present, and such others as he wishes to bring with him. If the archbishop cannot be present, proceedings shall continue without him, provided that if any of the twenty-five barons has been involved in a similar suit himself, his judgment shall be set aside, and someone else chosen and sworn in his place, as a substitute for the single occasion, by the rest of the twenty-five.

(56) If we have deprived or dispossessed any Welshmen of land, liberties, or anything else in England or in Wales, without the lawful judgment of their equals, these are at once to be returned to them. A dispute on this point shall be determined in the Marches by the judgment of equals. English law shall apply to holdings of land in England, Welsh law to those in Wales, and the law of the Marches to those in the Marches. The Welsh shall treat us and ours in the same way.

* (57) In cases where a Welshman was deprived or dispossessed of anything, without the lawful judgment of his equals, by our father King Henry or our brother King Richard, and it remains in our hands or is held by others under our warranty, we shall have respite for the period commonly allowed to Crusaders, unless a lawsuit had been begun, or an enquiry had been made at our order, before we took the Cross as a Crusader. But on our return from the Crusade, or if we abandon it, we will at once do full justice according to the laws of Wales and the said regions.

* (58) We will at once return the son of Llywelyn, all Welsh hostages, and the charters delivered to us as security for the peace.

* (59) With regard to the return of the sisters and hostages of Alexander, king of Scotland, his liberties and his rights, we will treat him in the same way as our other barons of England, unless it appears from the charters that we hold from his father William, formerly king of Scotland, that he should be treated otherwise. This matter shall be resolved by the judgment of his equals in our court.

(60) All these customs and liberties that we have granted shall be observed in our kingdom in so far as concerns our own relations with our subjects. Let all men of our kingdom, whether clergy or laymen, observe them similarly in their relations with their own men.

* (61) SINCE WE HAVE GRANTED ALL THESE THINGS for God, for the better ordering of our kingdom, and to allay the discord that has arisen between us and our barons, and since we desire that they shall be enjoyed in their entirety, with lasting strength, for ever, we give and grant to the barons the following security:

The barons shall elect twenty-five of their number to keep, and cause to be observed with all their might, the peace and liberties granted and confirmed to them by this charter.

If we, our chief justice, our officials, or any of our servants offend in any respect against any man, or transgress any of the articles of the peace or of this security, and the offence is made known to four of the said twenty-five barons, they shall come to us - or in our absence from the kingdom to the chief justice - to declare it and claim immediate redress. If we, or in our absence abroad the chief justice, make no redress within forty days, reckoning from the day on which the offence was declared to us or to him, the four barons shall refer the matter to the rest of the twenty-five barons, who may distrain upon and assail us in every way possible, with the support of the whole community of the land, by seizing our castles, lands, possessions, or anything else saving only our own person and those of the queen and our children, until they have secured such redress as they have determined upon. Having secured the redress, they may then resume their normal obedience to us.

Any man who so desires may take an oath to obey the commands of the twenty-five barons for the achievement of these ends, and to join with them in assailing us to the utmost of his power. We give public and free permission to take this oath to any man who so desires, and at no time will we prohibit any man from taking it. Indeed, we will compel any of our subjects who are unwilling to take it to swear it at our command.

If one of the twenty-five barons dies or leaves the country, or is prevented in any other way from discharging his duties, the rest of them shall choose another baron in his place, at their discretion, who shall be duly sworn in as they were.

In the event of disagreement among the twenty-five barons on any matter referred to them for decision, the verdict of the majority present shall have the same validity as a unanimous verdict of the whole twenty-five, whether these were all present or some of those summoned were unwilling or unable to appear.

The twenty-five barons shall swear to obey all the above articles faithfully, and shall cause them to be obeyed by others to the best of their power.

We will not seek to procure from anyone, either by our own efforts or those of a third party, anything by which any part of these concessions or liberties might be revoked or diminished. Should such a thing be procured, it shall be null and void and we will at no time make use of it, either ourselves or through a third party.

* (62) We have remitted and pardoned fully to all men any ill-will, hurt, or grudges that have arisen between us and our subjects, whether clergy or laymen, since the beginning of the dispute. We have in addition remitted fully, and for our own part have also pardoned, to all clergy and laymen any offences committed as a result of the said dispute between Easter in the sixteenth year of our reign (i.e. 1215) and the restoration of peace.

In addition we have caused letters patent to be made for the barons, bearing witness to this security and to the concessions set out above, over the seals of Stephen archbishop of Canterbury, Henry archbishop of Dublin, the other bishops named above, and Master Pandulf.

* (63) IT IS ACCORDINGLY OUR WISH AND COMMAND that the English Church shall be free, and that men in our kingdom shall have and keep all these liberties, rights, and concessions, well and peaceably in their fullness and entirety for them and their heirs, of us and our heirs, in all things and all places for ever.

Both we and the barons have sworn that all this shall be observed in good faith and without deceit. Witness the abovementioned people and many others.

Given by our hand in the meadow that is called Runnymede, between Windsor and Staines, on the fifteenth day of June in the seventeenth year of our reign (i.e. 1215: the new regnal year began on 28 May).

The text in this article is available under the Creative Commons License.

Truth and Marriage

American Thinker

Truth, Marriage, and the American Constitution

By John Kane, Erin Mersino, and William Wagner

Supporters of so-called “gay marriage” often try to equate their cause to that of the civil rights era case that actually established marriage equality. In Loving v. Virginia, the United States Supreme Court held that under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, States cannot ban interracial marriage. Loving affirmed the fundamental constitutional right of a man and woman to marry because “[m]arriage [between a man and a woman] is . . . fundamental to our very existence and survival,” as the Supreme Court previously held in Skinner v. Oklahoma. But marriage redefinition activists irrationally and unconstitutionally attempt to extend Loving to create a new federal right to marry without any qualification whatsoever. Loving emphasized the importance of marriage to all Americans, in the true sense of the word. It did not redefine the word. If one redefines “marriage” to mean whatever anyone wants it to mean, it has no definition and is no longer useful as a bearer of meaning.
Loving did not require this destruction of marriage. It did not hold that if prohibited conduct is defined by reference to a proclivity, then that prohibition violates the Fourteenth Amendment. There is no fundamental right for certain individuals to call their alternative arrangements “marriage” -- and to compel others who disagree to not only assent to, but contribute to, the support of that redefined institution. Indeed, such coercion would violate the fundamental right of marriage for those who support marriage’s true meaning. Loving simply does not support the fashionable but mindless “marriage equality” slogan, which is ultimately standardless and renders marriage equally meaningless for all.

The inventors of this proposed new “right” urge the Supreme Court to discard the long-established and proper limits on marriage under State law and, acting as a super-legislature, replace the traditional and rational definition of marriage with one that has no discernible limits. If “marriage” means fulfilling one’s personal choices regarding intimacy, as they insist, it is difficult to see how States could regulate marriage on any basis. If personal autonomy is the essence of marriage, then not only gender, but also number, familial relationship, and even species are insupportable limits on that principle, and they all will fall. For example, if the Court requires a redefinition of marriage according to sexual preference because not doing so is discriminatory, then it would be furthering discrimination by not also allowing bisexual individuals to marry two spouses of opposite sexes in order to fulfill their desired union for companionship. This initial rejection of marriage that they propose is not just a slippery slope -- it is a bottomless pit.

Yet these “progressives” essentially claim that their proposed redefinition improves marriage by adding a necessary but currently lacking element of “equality” to it. This is certainly a clever ploy, for who can oppose equality?  But that is all that it is, a ploy. It is not a valid point. 
Marriage already has all the equality it can contain without destruction of its meaning, purpose, and proper boundaries. Any legally competent man can marry any legally competent woman, regardless of his or the woman’s race, religion, national origin, or even sexual preference, and vice versa. The problem they claim that the Court must resolve is one that does not exist. Truemarriage equality already exists. 
What these marriage redefinition activists actually seek is not equality but instead a self-indulgent form of inclusiveness that demands acceptance, and indeed support, of a wide variety of sexual conduct that society has no interest in supporting and no obligation to support. And once this “inclusiveness” camel gets its nose in the marriage tent, marriage will not be a better tent; it will be trampled and destroyed. The marriage redefinition lobby argues that they can take our social body’s fundamental building block, remake it in their own amorphous image, and society will be healthier. They essentially argue they can remove the walls from our cells, place them back in the body, and the body will be healthier. It will not. Cells without walls will die, and with them so does the body.
Though they do not openly admit it, these “progressives” proffer a subjective view of the reality of marriage. But a subjective view of reality has as many realities as it has subjects.  If everyone can define what marriage means to him or her, and the State must accede to that view, where will that lead us? What will the state of our society then be? Will it be the Utopia of freedom and growth that the “progressives” imply, or will it degenerate into chaos? Is that a chance that the Supreme Court is rightfully empowered to take, or is such a choice reserved to the people under Article V’s constitutional amendment provision?
Let us spell out the truth about this subjectivist argument as simply as we can. If someone wants to go bowling, they can go to a bowling alley with whoever they choose -- a friend of the same or opposite gender, or five such friends, or a child (or their favorite pet, perhaps, in a more “enlightened” establishment). And they can all bowl together. But if that same entourage goes into a bowling alley and demands that they be permitted to “bowl” using pogo sticks, hula hoops, parasols, and buckets and buckets of whipped cream -- but no balls or pins, because those offend their sensibilities -- the proprietor will be completely justified in denying that request. He will not be denying them their fundamental right to bowl. He will not be unfairly discriminating against them or treating them like second-class citizens. He will not be manifesting “hate.” He will merely be telling them the truth: What they want to do is their business, but it’s not bowling. And if the truth offends their sensibilities, that is their problem, not his. They simply have no cause of action against him.
The LGBTQ lobby’s plight is no different. They all have the fundamental right to marry. No one is denying them that. But they do not have the right to tell the rest of the country that we must recognize their non-marital relationships to be the same as marriage. They are not. They may be dissatisfied with the fact that their view of marriage does not comport with reality, but if their dissatisfaction is to be remedied, it is their view -- or some other aspect of their behavior -- that must change, not reality.
Marriage equality already exists – Loving cleared up the last impediment to its enforcement. To protect marriage from those who would destroy its true meaning, the Supreme Court must adhere to its mandate to interpret the Constitution and avoid the temptation to unlawfully rewrite it in the name of “progress”.
On behalf of a coalition of over 25,000 African-American churches and ministries, Kane, Mersino, and Wagner authored an Amicus brief in the marriage cases currently pending before the Supreme Court.

Supporters of so-called “gay marriage” often try to equate their cause to that of the civil rights era case that actually established marriage equality. In Loving v. Virginia, the United States Supreme Court held that under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, States cannot ban interracial marriage. Loving affirmed the fundamental constitutional right of a man and woman to marry because “[m]arriage [between a man and a woman] is . . . fundamental to our very existence and survival,” as the Supreme Court previously held in Skinner v. Oklahoma. But marriage redefinition activists irrationally and unconstitutionally attempt to extend Loving to create a new federal right to marry without any qualification whatsoever. Loving emphasized the importance of marriage to all Americans, in the true sense of the word. It did not redefine the word. If one redefines “marriage” to mean whatever anyone wants it to mean, it has no definition and is no longer useful as a bearer of meaning.
Loving did not require this destruction of marriage. It did not hold that if prohibited conduct is defined by reference to a proclivity, then that prohibition violates the Fourteenth Amendment. There is no fundamental right for certain individuals to call their alternative arrangements “marriage” -- and to compel others who disagree to not only assent to, but contribute to, the support of that redefined institution. Indeed, such coercion would violate the fundamental right of marriage for those who support marriage’s true meaning. Loving simply does not support the fashionable but mindless “marriage equality” slogan, which is ultimately standardless and renders marriage equally meaningless for all.
The inventors of this proposed new “right” urge the Supreme Court to discard the long-established and proper limits on marriage under State law and, acting as a super-legislature, replace the traditional and rational definition of marriage with one that has no discernible limits. If “marriage” means fulfilling one’s personal choices regarding intimacy, as they insist, it is difficult to see how States could regulate marriage on any basis. If personal autonomy is the essence of marriage, then not only gender, but also number, familial relationship, and even species are insupportable limits on that principle, and they all will fall. For example, if the Court requires a redefinition of marriage according to sexual preference because not doing so is discriminatory, then it would be furthering discrimination by not also allowing bisexual individuals to marry two spouses of opposite sexes in order to fulfill their desired union for companionship. This initial rejection of marriage that they propose is not just a slippery slope -- it is a bottomless pit.
Yet these “progressives” essentially claim that their proposed redefinition improves marriage by adding a necessary but currently lacking element of “equality” to it. This is certainly a clever ploy, for who can oppose equality?  But that is all that it is, a ploy. It is not a valid point. 
Marriage already has all the equality it can contain without destruction of its meaning, purpose, and proper boundaries. Any legally competent man can marry any legally competent woman, regardless of his or the woman’s race, religion, national origin, or even sexual preference, and vice versa. The problem they claim that the Court must resolve is one that does not exist. Truemarriage equality already exists. 

What these marriage redefinition activists actually seek is not equality but instead a self-indulgent form of inclusiveness that demands acceptance, and indeed support, of a wide variety of sexual conduct that society has no interest in supporting and no obligation to support. And once this “inclusiveness” camel gets its nose in the marriage tent, marriage will not be a better tent; it will be trampled and destroyed. The marriage redefinition lobby argues that they can take our social body’s fundamental building block, remake it in their own amorphous image, and society will be healthier. They essentially argue they can remove the walls from our cells, place them back in the body, and the body will be healthier. It will not. Cells without walls will die, and with them so does the body.

Though they do not openly admit it, these “progressives” proffer a subjective view of the reality of marriage. But a subjective view of reality has as many realities as it has subjects.  If everyone can define what marriage means to him or her, and the State must accede to that view, where will that lead us? What will the state of our society then be? Will it be the Utopia of freedom and growth that the “progressives” imply, or will it degenerate into chaos? Is that a chance that the Supreme Court is rightfully empowered to take, or is such a choice reserved to the people under Article V’s constitutional amendment provision?
Let us spell out the truth about this subjectivist argument as simply as we can. If someone wants to go bowling, they can go to a bowling alley with whoever they choose -- a friend of the same or opposite gender, or five such friends, or a child (or their favorite pet, perhaps, in a more “enlightened” establishment). And they can all bowl together. But if that same entourage goes into a bowling alley and demands that they be permitted to “bowl” using pogo sticks, hula hoops, parasols, and buckets and buckets of whipped cream -- but no balls or pins, because those offend their sensibilities -- the proprietor will be completely justified in denying that request. He will not be denying them their fundamental right to bowl. He will not be unfairly discriminating against them or treating them like second-class citizens. He will not be manifesting “hate.” He will merely be telling them the truth: What they want to do is their business, but it’s not bowling. And if the truth offends their sensibilities, that is their problem, not his. They simply have no cause of action against him.
The LGBTQ lobby’s plight is no different. They all have the fundamental right to marry. No one is denying them that. But they do not have the right to tell the rest of the country that we must recognize their non-marital relationships to be the same as marriage. They are not. They may be dissatisfied with the fact that their view of marriage does not comport with reality, but if their dissatisfaction is to be remedied, it is their view -- or some other aspect of their behavior -- that must change, not reality.
Marriage equality already exists – Loving cleared up the last impediment to its enforcement. To protect marriage from those who would destroy its true meaning, the Supreme Court must adhere to its mandate to interpret the Constitution and avoid the temptation to unlawfully rewrite it in the name of “progress”.
On behalf of a coalition of over 25,000 African-American churches and ministries, Kane, Mersino, and Wagner authored an Amicus brief in the marriage cases currently pending before the Supreme Court.

A Healthy Culture

From Crisis Magazine
JUNE 1, 2015

How to Identify a Healthy Culture

ANTHONY ESOLEN

How should we judge the health of a culture?

We might do it by pointing to its greatest virtues. The Greek city states between 500 and 300 B.C., though they were not especially densely populated, gave the west the architectural “language” it still employs for everything from grand hotels to private homes. The colonial house, in this sense, belongs to a Greek colony before the American. Athens gave us the ideals and some of the techniques of democracy. She invented the drama, and the great troika of tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, are unsurpassed by anyone to come, except for Shakespeare himself. Without Greek sculpture there is no Michelangelo, no Rodin. All philosophy, said Alfred North Whitehead, is a footnote to Plato.

We might do it by pointing to its greatest vices. In Victorian England, if the physical grime from industry was thick, the moral grime of “scientific” approaches to education and human welfare was a veritable crust—over the molten rock of licentiousness, violence, and greed. Think of the women and children recruited for miserable and dangerous work in the mills, just because they would agree to work for lower wages than the men, who for their part might go hang, or drink away their idle lives. Across the water, in the United States, men prided themselves upon their love of liberty, while accepting as an accomplished fact the enslavement of some millions of their fellow men; and then they erupted into a war that cost the nation seven hundred thousand souls, from which she emerged with a moral mission to take her liberty to the rest of the world, by force if need be. As for us, well, more than a million children are snuffed out every year, as we make violence to the innocent pay the price for our lusts.

But perhaps we should do it by pointing to the ordinary things, those things that are characteristic not of the particular culture, but of all cultures.

How do we bring together, in a healthy way, young men and young women, so that they will learn how to forbear with the shortcomings and be grateful for the virtues of the other sex; so that they marry and then have children, raising them in the haven of a home that will be “home” even for their children’s children, should God grant them to live so long?

How do we teach children the history of their nation and their civilization, so that they will both admit their failures and honor their achievements? How do we instill in them a kind of patriotism that is as natural as a sapling sending down its roots deeper and deeper into the soil? How do we foster a love for the peculiarities of our home, its “rocks and rills,” simply because it is our own, our native land?

How do we adorn our homes and our public places with art that comes from the people and is for the people? What whimsical craftsmanship is to be found on the steps of the post office, or the balustrade at the courthouse, or the eaves of the dry goods store? Do we build what is simple and sweet, or rather what is dull and drab? Do we build what is colorful and bold, or rather what is garish and obnoxious? Do we build what is noble and grand, or rather what is gigantic and inhuman?

What songs do we sing? If our captors asked us to sing the songs of Sion in an alien land, would we know any? How many of us could pick up a guitar or a fiddle nearby and play a love song passed down from ear to hand to ear to hand, from one generation to the next? What music brings together grandparent and grandchild?

What are the children doing when they are not in school or at work? Where is the child-culture that flows like a boisterous stream parallel to the great slow river of what the grown men and women do? What games do they play, whose origin no one knows? What wisdom and skill do they pass along beside or beneath the notice of their parents? With what kinds of gangs or teams, if any, do the streets swarm?

When we get together with all of our neighbors, what do we do? Do we build a house, raise a barn, glean the corn, bale the hay, march in parade, listen to patriotic speeches, play music, compete in games of skill or speed or strength, sing songs, honor the dead, or fall to our knees in prayer? Do we in fact do anything with our neighbors?

When we gather to determine a course of action for securing the common good, can we eventually put aside our differences of opinion and get something done? I am speaking here about localities. A bridge needs repair. Can we find a way to repair it expeditiously? Are there ministers of public order on our streets? Do we know the names of a few of them? Are they well integrated with the people they serve? Can quarrels be settled by policemen without recourse to law?

How hard is it to begin a small business? Can a young man with a strong back and skilled hands and a willingness to work set himself up without much ado? Are craftsmen easy to find, and their work apparent to all? How many young men who are not going to be doctors or lawyers or professors can earn a sufficient wage to begin a family? How many young married women need not farm themselves out for a middling wage, but can do the intimate and necessary work of family life and even culture itself?

What do the people do with their leisure, if they have any? Have those with an inclination to read been trained in the appreciation of good books? What are the stories that everyone knows?

How do they worship together? Are the churches and synagogues full? Do people have a shared sense of their place in the world before God? Are their lives as parents, children, teachers, students, workmen, businessmen, neighbors, and citizens integrated at all with their lives as mere human beings standing in the light of eternity? Which is more likely to be heard, a church bell or a police siren? What stirs the heart? What causes people to set aside their enmity?

These are not extraordinary things.

They are also, I am coming to believe, interrelated things. I am not saying that each one implies every other one, necessarily. I am saying that they are characteristics of human culture, and that a healthy culture will manage to get most of them done most of the time.

So when we ask, “Why are the churches empty?” we might also ask, “Why are our public buildings so ugly? Why do we no longer have any folk art to speak of? Why do neighbors not know one another? Why are there no dances for everyone of all ages to enjoy? Why is the sight of a young lad and lass holding hands as rare now as public indecency used to be? Why is no one getting married? Why have family trees turned into family sticks, or family briars?

“Why are there so many feral young men and women, tattooed and slovenly, loitering about shopping malls or slouching towards the internet for their porn? Why are there so many old neighborhoods, roads, and bridges crumbling, while millions of young men are unemployed or, worse, unemployable? Why do so many teachers believe it their duty to tear down the glories of their own civilization, calling it ‘critical thinking,’ without a passing thought as to what will remain in their place? Who are what used to be called the “leading men” of an ordinary town? Are there any? Who are what used to be called ‘city fathers’? Are there any?

“Where are the songs of yesteryear? Where are the poems? Where are the holidays? What happened to the parades and the marching bands?

“What virtue do we honor, other than what we call tolerance, which turns out not to be tolerance at all but the ‘virtue’ of demanding that there should be no honor granted to virtue?”

For once I bring a little cold comfort to the leaders of my church. They are not the only people who have proved to be massively incompetent. We are all implicated. We have made a poor show of it.

Editor’s note: The image above titled “The Jolly Flatboatmen” was painted by George Caleb Bingham in 1846.

Deradicalisation of militant Muslims

Deradicalisation of militant Muslims not a viable option

There must be deep discussion among Muslims speaking to one another not as Muslims but as Australian citizens. Source: AFP

As the Lindt cafe coronial inquest opens, we again ask ourselves the same questions. How did it happen? Could it happen again? And how might a recurrence be prevented, or at least discouraged and rendered less likely?
Here, increasingly, the remedy, or buzzword, we are offered is “deradicalisation”. Whether such an approach is likely to yield positive results needs to be faced clearly and honestly.
If a repeat of the Sydney atrocity is attempted, it may be the project of a psychotic loner. In that case there is little to be done. What remedy or prophylactic we may have lies with our mental health system and the ability of the ­nation’s security establishment to grasp and act on those clinical findings.
But most such incidents are the work of psychotic, sociopathic, disturbed or even ostensibly normal individuals who fall in with, and whose ideas and perverse impulses mesh them into, small like-minded groups, sometimes even broad social movements.

In these cases the question becomes: what is the relation between the mindset of the small group and that of the mainstream from which they emerge and against which they may stand? Are the orientations and outlooks basically the same, or at least compatible and congruent? Or are the outsiders really deviants who have turned against and repudiate the intellectual, cultural and political milieu that spawned them?

Where they have departed decisively from the broader norm, they may perhaps be brought back into the community’s fold by efforts directed at some kind of thought-reform, faith rectification or intellectual realignment and reabsorption. That, broadly, is the strategy of deradicalisation.

But when the source of such potential violence — namely its basic outlook and driving attitudes — is not distinctive to the breakaway group, as some kind of outsider heresy, but lies within the wider group and its familiar doctrinal furniture, deradicalisation must be an unpromising strategy. Here it can offer little hope of success since the community mainstream and its insiders have no independent and distinctive moral ground of their own on which to stand, and to which they may call back the deviants to the ways of sound thinking and belief.

Which of these two situations better typifies the relation of the militant and potentially violent Islamists to the mainstream community norm and its faith patterns? Here it is the latter, with all its unpromising implications and prospects for successful deradicalisation. Why so?

Among Muslims worldwide today, about 10 to 15 per cent, it may be suggested, are modernist, reform-minded and democratic; perhaps another 10 to 15 per cent are militant, radical, extreme and potentially active in violent forms.

Between these two clusters, the 70 per cent in the middle represent what may be called conventional or quasi-traditional Islam.

The question is: what is the relation of the views of the radical extreme to those of the centrist mainstream? Are they opposed, a deviationist breakaway, or are they basically identical, or at least complementary?

It would be reassuring if things were otherwise, but the basic facts are clear. Like the radical fringe or fundamentalist extreme, the Muslim mainstream adheres to, through explicit affirmation or by unreflecting habitual assent, the same underlying propositions that constitute the radical and militant world view. Like that of the militants, their Islam, or view of it, is basically supersessionist.

That is, they hold, as core Islamic doctrine has held from the outset in its Koranic foundations, that Islam embodies and carries forward all that was once good in Judaism and Christianity (a fact that now makes those predecessors superfluous and lacking in continuing spiritual value and authenticity); and that what it does not carry forward from them is not good (and was the expression of an earlier, incomplete and defective revelation or else the result of the subsequent faults, sometimes wilful, in the recording and transmission of the sacred revelation by rabbis and priests).

And it is triumphalist, holding the view that Islam succeeded in the world, notably in its engagements and confrontations with the worlds of Judaism and Christendom, because its belief system was superior (and its long-lasting political ascendancy was conversely seen for a millennium as the proof and vindication of Islam’s religious superiority). While the power of Islam may have been eclipsed during the past two or three centuries, the subordination and shame of Islam is temporary and ultimately will be reversed.

Many Muslims, not just the militants but those throughout the mainstream or centre ground of their faith community’s social spectrum, chafe against the ­humiliation the world of Islam has experienced in modern times at the hand of non-Muslims, believe this situation must and will be reversed, and that determined action on the part of the faithful is necessary to bring about that ­divinely ordained historical restoration of Islamic dignity, autonomy and even ascendancy.

The mainstream and the militants, including the violent implementers of militant ideas, share this outlook. The difference is simply, or largely, one of the means and measures and strategies that different kinds of Muslims are prepared to countenance in realising Islam’s divinely vouchsafed historical destiny.

The implication is clear. Since the radicals and the mainstream share — if in different forms and style and emphasis — the same religiously grounded historical world view, the two orientations are basically complementary and congruent, not opposed. So there is no ground within the mainstream for calling back the deviant minority; no distinctive standpoint, authentic and authoritative, to which the radicals may be called to return by abandoning their own identifiable heresies. The moderates from the centrist mainstream stand bereft of the religiously based political and moral authority to make such calls persuasively, in ways that may prove enduringly convincing.

How has this situation come about? In short, the Abrahamic faiths and faith communities of Judaism and Christianity, or least key aspects and large parts of them, have been enlarged and transformed by their engagement with liberal modernity. This is not the case with Islam.

By contrast, most major modern trends in the faith and among its adherents have been shaped, if anything, by the history of their painful, and much resented, subjugation to Western-generated modernity — social and economic, technical and administrative, cultural and intellectual, as well as military — and by the long history of Islamic resistance to that domination.

Those are the facts and experiences that shape the soul and mind, the historical awareness and sensitivities, of modern Muslims everywhere; and those too, when held and expressed as powerfully felt resentments, are what drive the actions of Islam’s militants. Militant Islam does not depart from and repudiate the Islamic mainstream and its presuppositions. It replicates and echoes and affirms them in an amplified and disturbing fashion.

So long as the two outlooks remain basically congruent and complementary, so-called deradicalisation of the militants back into the mainstream cannot work. It is not a likely prospect. It cannot succeed so long as the mainstream is not distinctively different in its basic attitudes from the radicals.

That will remain the case, with its unpromising implications for the strategy of deradicalisation, so long as the Islamic mainstream ­remains unreformed and untransformed in its basic presuppositions; so long as it remains an outsider to modernity, so long as it shuns rather than embraces the emancipating and individualising spirit of advanced modernity.

So long, that is, as mainstream Islam retains, implanted within it from the long evolution of Islamic civilisation, the same supersessionist, triumphalist and resentfully restorationist outlook that frames and drives militant Islamist action worldwide.

Thoughtful, modernising, liberal and democratic Muslims well understand what the problem is here, and they have shaken themselves loose from those attitudes. But they have not succeeded in detaching the mainstream Muslim majority and its thinking from those enduring ideas and that defining orientation.

They have not just failed, despite their heroic efforts, to uproot that kind of thinking; worse, they find themselves stigmatised, marginalised and scandalised for their attempts.

The tide has been running strongly against them in the world of Islam during the past half-century, which has witnessed a return to Islam “as the solution, not the problem” and a reaffirmation of Islamic identity in a variety of forms of Islamist politics.

Increasingly, the militants and the mainstream share a common mindset and set of attitudes. The difference is that those in the mainstream tend to accept and go along with them habitually, while the radical Islamist ideologues take those framing ideas seriously and literally, and seek to affirm them actively. They seek to enact and perform and so make those ideas real and, in that way, to make them prevail politically. The ideas of groups such as Hizb ut-Tahrir are simply that more generalised and often vague mindset made explicit, formalised and ideologised as doctrine. They offer it as sacred theory. Militant jihadi Islam goes a step further: it represents that same idea, that theory, activated and rendered in violent practice.

If this is the case — and no serious argument has been made against it as there has been no recognition that this is the nature of the problem — then community-based, community-supported and community-driven strategies of deradicalisation cannot work. They are doomed from the start.

“Fight the terrorists by partnering with Muslims and their communities” is the mantra of the counter-terrorism experts and the deradicalisation gurus to whom they turn. Of course one would, if and when that is possible. Of course it would be better to work with, rather than without or against, the Muslim community and its leadership. But to whom can one turn when there is this blurring and overlap between the outlook of the mainstream and the radical extremists?

The best to whom one may turn may be none too good. Earlier this week a leading community leader voiced the view that the former grand mufti of Australia Taj Din al-Hilali had been a misunderstood voice of moderation.

Such views are endorsed from within our universities where scholars specialising in Australian multiculturalism opine that Hilali — his execrable view of Jews as a poisonous and corrupting influence on societies throughout history notwithstanding — has been a notable force for interfaith ­dialogue and conciliation in this country.

What is needed is not, as the deradicalisation paradigm and strategy suggest, an effort to save the supposed dupes and victims of “bad Islam” by offering them conventional mainstream Islam as a “good Islam” antidote.

Doing so does not transform or re-educate the radicals. It cannot enlarge their militant outlook or wean them from it. It can, at best, only leave the militants unaffected or, at worst, serve to reaffirm and revalidate the foundations of their stance — while convincing them the mainstream are no better than weak-hearted hypocrites for voicing views they dare not unreservedly promote and implement.

Restoring the militants to the mainstream seen as “good Islam” does not even start to confront or uproot the underlying attitudes that drive radical Islam, as those attitudes are themselves inherent and ingrained within the mainstream mindset and outlook and its basic assumptions.

Mainstream attitudes, unre­formed, simply conduce, or at least can readily conduce, towards radicalism and its reinforcement, not to deradicalisation.

This will remain the case so long as Muslim minority communities in the Islamic diaspora in the West, such as in Australia, continue to act from and on their conventional outlook and historical consciousness.

Which is to say, so long as they continue to perceive their situation and engage with the wider world of which they are now part on the basis of conventional Islam’s “majoritarian” and “governmentalist” attitudes: the idea that ours is a society in which Islamic requirements must prevail, such as the view that it is impermissible to offer generally, and hence for Muslims to be faced with, depictions — even ironic depictions— of the Prophet Mohammed; and similar ideas that are basic to the supersessionist and ultimately triumphalist, restorationist and retributionist outlook that is embodied in conventional Islamic historical consciousness.

If deradicalisation won’t work, people may ask, what will? Don’t just be negative, some urge, suggest something positive, a way forward. What needs to happen is clear, but how to bring it about will be no simple thing.

What needs to happen is first, there must be some serious, honest and deep discussion of these matters among Muslims speaking to one another not as Muslims but as Australian citizens.

Second, there needs to be some honest and serious and responsible discussion of these same matters within the wider Australian community. For that to happen, the possibility of, the need for and the legitimacy of such discussion needs to be acknowledged.

What that means is that the formal barriers and informal inhibitions thwarting responsible and constructive public discussion throughout Australian society of Islam, and of the Islamic civilisational legacy within and as a part of world history, need to be removed.

And third — ultimately, perhaps beginning only gradually and carefully — those two parts of the discussion of Islam as a matter of legitimate interest to all Australians and to Australian society as a whole need to be brought together. Not necessarily on a view that they should immediately become one and the same, but that they may connect and engage with one another. Both sides stand to benefit from that kind of exploration and negotiation of religious and cultural differences, and convergences, framed on both sides by some encompassing ideas of Australian citizenship and of membership in our national community.

But that is not what is happening. It has yet to begin. Meanwhile, we talk instead of deradicalisation. Offered as a rescuing strategy, deradicalisation may be only an unfounded hope, perhaps even a forlorn fantasy.

Clive Kessler is emeritus professor of sociology and anthropology at the University of NSW. He has been studying Islam, the shaping of Islamic civilisation within world history, and the sources of militant Islam for more than 50 years.