Back in 1911, three law students at Georgetown University founded the fifth law journal associated with an academic institution here in America. Georgetown Law followed the first four journals from University of Pennsylvania (1852), Harvard (1887), Yale (1891), and Columbia (1901). One of the three students, Eugene Quay, was Georgetown Law's first "editor" and he oversaw the production of the journal's charter issue (which incidentally contained a lead article on patent law twenty-six pages long with only five footnotes).1 Those were the days.
Quay went on to practice law in Chicago where his wife, Effie, was a newspaper journalist as well as a pro-life author and activist. Respected by his colleagues, Eugene ascended to the legal stratosphere of membership in the American Law Institute (ALI) which still today remains the most powerfully corrosive influence on America you've never heard of. It was Eugene and Effie Quay's son, Fr. Paul Quay S.J. of Loyola University, who first told me of the American Law Institute.
Back in the early eighties, I had just graduated from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and entered pastoral ministry. Dad recommended I atttend the conference of Allies for Faith and Renewal in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and it was there I met three Roman Catholic men who have have heavily influenced my thinking to this day...
The first is Mike (E. Michael) Jones: when we met at the conference, Mike told of his new magazine, Fidelity (now called Culture Wars) and I subscribed and have been an avid reader since. Baylyblog has carried several recommendations of Mike's work. It was also at Allies that I met Stephen B. Clark who, as one of the leaders of the Word of God community, was a sponsor of the conference. He had just completed his work, Man and Woman in Christ, and if you can only read one book on Biblical sexuality, don't waste your time on any other.
The third man I met was Fr. Paul Quay and, following the conference, we kept in regular contact and became close friends. Since we were both heavily involved in opposing abortion and infanticide, we had opportunities to work together on a couple projects including bringing Mother Theresa to address the PC(USA) 1998 General Assembly in St. Louis. A board member of Presbyterians Pro-Life at the time, I went to Paul to help us contact Mother Theresa to invite her to address our historic 200th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA). Here is the video of her address:
In my library is a large collection of books and publications dealing with abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, as well as other aspects of the bloodlust introduced to our nation by our lawyers and physicians. One book is a bound copy of two articles authored by Paul's father, Eugene Quay, from the Georgetown Law Journal of 1960/61—fifty years after Quay founded the journal.
Titled, "Justifiable Abortion—Medical and Legal Foundations, Parts One and Two,"2 when Paul gave me the volume, he explained what had led his Dad to write the articles.
As I said earlier, his Dad, Eugene, had been a member of the American Law Institute and therefore was privy to ALI's work behind the scenes drafting model legislation and lobbying for its adoption on the state and federal level. ALI's model legislation was intended to further policy changes desired of by ALI members. Starting in the late fifties and moving through the sixties and into the early seventies, ALI's members pursued the liberalization of abortion laws and their efforts finally bore fruit in the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision by which they repealed every state's ban on abortion.3
Paul explained to me that, from the catbird seat of ALI membership, his father had seen what was coming and his articles in Georgetown Law Journal were his own personal attempt to stave off the slaughter.
Still today, the American Law Institute exerts a formidable and wicked influence which is bearing the fruit this very day of SCOTUS's refusal to review decisions of federal appellate court judges declaring state laws banning homosexual marriage unconstitutional.
Members of ALI readily admit their influence is largely hidden and that's how they want it. ALI doesn't file friend-of-court briefs, although they are ocassionally cited in a brief or opinion. Back in 2001, the Duke Journal of Gender Law & Policy had an article by ALI member Mary Coombs titled, "Insiders and Outsiders: What the American Law Institute Has Done for Gay and Lesbian Families."4 Coombs explained ALI's influence this way:
This commentary will examine how the American Law Institute’s Principles of the Law of Family Dissolution might help fill these gaps [in protection for gays and lesbians wanting courts to help with the dissolution of their homosexual partnerships]....
The Principles are bibliographically classified as the product of the “American Law Institute.” That imprimatur makes them more influential than the same document attached solely to the names of its Reporters—Professors Ellman, Bartlett and Blumberg. To a large number of judges, lawyers and, to a lesser extent, legislators and the general public, the “authorship” of the American Law Institute serves a strong legitimizing function. The organization is made up of judges, practicing attorneys and legal academics, who have the reputation as being among the “best and brightest,” which a large number of them undoubtedly deserve.
And:
To the extent that an ALI product like the Principles resolves disputable legal issues in ways that provide more rather than less protection for less- empowered groups (such as gay and lesbian families), that resolution should be relatively more influential than the same approach taken in a purely academic publication. Unlike academia, the ALI is unlikely to be (falsely) tarred as a captive of left-leaning political correctness.
The lead article in the Spring 2011 issue of the The Family in America is Ryan C. MacPherson's, "From No-Fault Divorce to Same-Sex Marriage: The American Law Institute's Role in Deconstructing the Family." This piece, too, shows that our culture of divorce, sexual perversion, family breakdown—together with the bloodshed of innocents—are the legacy of the American Law Institute's work and that legacy will be with us, our children, and grandchildren for many generations to come.
The American Law Institute is toxic to American government and rule of law. Those who care for the future of these United States will do their best to force ALI out of the closet and into the light of public scrutiny where it may finally be silenced.
A half-century has passed since Eugene Quay's heroic work opposing the legalization of abortion. Since then, abortion has filled our sinks, gutters, dumpsters, sanitary landfills, sewage treatment plants, streams, creeks, rivers and oceans with babies' blood.
Why bother telling this story?
To hold up Eugene Quay as a hero to a new generation of Christian pastors, physicians, lawyers, professors, and public servants I pray will be willing to take up their crosses and follow Jesus. Also to memorialize this day when the Roberts Supreme Court again demonstrated their habit of connivance at lawlessness in their refusal to review the exercise of raw judicial power by those federal judges who have repealed state laws banning homosexual marriage.
Tim serves Clearnote Church, Bloomington, Indiana. He and Mary Lee have five children and big lots of grandchildren.
Want to get in touch? Send Tim an email!
