‘Her Fiancé, Garry Brown Sr., the Man Who Fathered 10 of Her 15 Children …’
Posted on | July 6, 2012 | 50 Comments
Something about hearing that sentence in the video stuck in my head, besides the fact that the sentence ended with “… was arrested,” but you have to do some research to discover that Brown is currently serving a five-year-sentence for dealing cocaine. The Florida woman’s name is Angel Adams and she says her children are “a gift from God,” although she doesn’t strike me as very angelic, and I’m not too certain that God approves of the lifestyle by which Ms. Adams found herself at age 37 with 15 children by three different fathers:
All this drama transpired in 2010, but the video — with nearly 2 million views — for some reason topped the recommendations by YouTube when I logged in today to upload a video about my own family. So I decided to do some research and, in a Tampa Tribune article, read this quote by a spokeswoman for a Hillsborough County non-profit agency:
“Children always are better with their biological parents.”
– Elaine Olszewski
Perhaps some people would care to debate Ms. Olszewski on the subject of whether there are exceptions to that general rule, and whether the case of Angel Adams is one such exception. You will notice that when a conservative proposes a general rule of human behavior, liberals are quick to cite some exception to that rule. However, when liberals propose general rules, no conservative is permitted to cite exceptions, and thus any attempt to discuss human behavior with liberals is doomed to end in the accusation that conservatives are arguing unfairly.
Of course, it’s probably a bit late for such a debate to have any meaningful utility in the case of Ms. Adams and her numerous progeny, but it might be helpful in determining appropriate standards for social agency interventions in the future.
The case of Angel Adams is also probably helpful as a basic political litmus test of sorts. You may have noticed that liberals delight in making crude jests about pro-life Christian families like the Duggars. Yet if anyone calls attention to the case of a hyper-procreative welfare mother with multiple babydaddies including an imprisoned cocaine dealer — a dreadful situation that imposes heavy costs on innocent taxpayers — the very same liberals will predictably scream, “RAAAAACIST!”
Yet it is not the race, but rather the behavior, of Angel Adams which is the problem, and her behavior is rooted in an attitude, one that is commonly labled “the entitlement mentality.” I’ve seen the entitlement mentality manifested in various ways by all types of people. No race has a monopoly on such selfish attitudes, but liberals go out of their way to justify the entitlement mentality when it comes to certain groups of people whom liberals apparently view as Official Victims of Society.
Liberalism, as a philosophy, requires such victims as proof that America is fundamentally unjust, thus in need of the kind of “reforms” that liberals advocate. Examining the arguments of liberals — to the extent that liberals actually engage in arguments, rather than mere name-calling — the conservative points out that much of the “social injustice” bemoaned by today’s liberalism is actually a direct byproduct of previous liberal “reforms.”
In the case of Ms. Adams, for example, one sees not only the result of LBJ’s “Great Society” expansion of welfare programs, but also a fairly predictable consequence of the Sexual Revolution that liberals insisted was necessary for Americans to escape the oppressive shackles of our nation’s puritanical Judeo-Christian heritage.
Was it really a coincidence that we were urged to discard pre-marital chastity and marital fidelity at just about the same time that we were told that the old-fashioned “Protestant work ethic” was obsolete, harmful and inappropriate for victimized minorities? I think not.
And about the same time that America’s ideals of sexual probity and economic self-sufficiency came under assault in the 1960s, a generation of youth were urged to “Tune In, Turn On and Drop Out.”
It seems a long way from the hippy-dippy hallucinogenic gospel of Timothy Leary to the arrest of Garry Brown Sr. for dealing cocaine, but one cannot say that this consequence — however unintended — was entirely unpredictable. If Professor Leary at Harvard thought it a fine thing for the offspring of America’s elite to experiment with “expanding their consciousness,” certainly he ought to have recognized that an egalitarian democracy would extend this privilege also to the less fortunate, who lacked adequate resources for coping with the results of drug addiction.
President Obama and his liberal friends like to lecture us about the alleged evils of “the 1%” — the ultra-rich who supposedly refuse to pay “their fair share” of taxes to support Angel Adams and her children (or to keep Garry Brown Sr. in prison). But where is the justice or morality in compelling the ultra-rich (or anyone else) to pay more to foot the bill for these predictable consequences of liberalism? How can anyone be faulted for an unwillingness to pay for new liberal “reforms” when they can see with their own eyes the endless misery produced by old liberal “reforms”?
Is Hillsborough County Circuit Court Judge Tracy Sheehan a liberal or a conservative? Is she a Democrat or a Republican? It doesn’t matter. The point is, Judge Sheehan is absolutely right:
TAMPA — A courtroom full of people who paid off Angel Yulee Adams’ debts and found a rent-free, six-bedroom home for her and a dozen of her children waited Monday morning for a sign of gratitude, a clue of cooperation. They waited for a thank you.
They didn’t get it. Angel Adams, 37, said she was glad to have the home. But she wanted them all out of her life.
“I’ve been railroaded since day one,” she said.
The state says day one was 21 months and 28 hearings ago, when Adams first landed in the courtroom of Hillsborough Circuit Judge Tracy Sheehan. Ever since then, Sheehan said, the state has tried to keep Adams and her children together. . . .
Judge Sheehan gave her a lecture.
Adams would not have sat through 28 hearings if her kids had been fed, got their medicines and were living in a good home, the judge said. “We know you want us out of your life,” she told Adams. “We will be thrilled to close this case when you have all these things.”
Adams sat at a table just below the judge’s bench, looking away from Sheehan.
“A lot of people have gone way extra miles for you,” Sheehan said. “Do you understand that?”
Adams replied quietly, “No comment, your honor.”
“Hear what I’m saying,” the judge told her. “Reach out your hand to these people instead of looking a gift horse in the mouth and asking for more, more, more.”
Did Judge Sheehan expect her lecture to do any good?
If so, she’s probably a liberal. Any conservative must be dubious of the likelihood that Angel Adams will be any more responsible in the future than she has been in the past. It’s not “racist” to be realistic about human nature, to expect that people who have lived their entire lives engaged in a pattern of helpless, irresponsible dependency will continue being helpless, irresponsible and dependent. But liberalism requires us to abandon common-sense judgment and pretend that human nature is an unknown quantity, an utterly unpredictable factor in the equation, so that we might somehow expect Angel Adams suddenly to change her ways and become a responsible, upstanding, productive citizen.
To expect gratitude from Angel Adams, the living embodiment of the entitlement mentality, is not just liberalism, it’s lunacy. Not that there’s much difference between the two, but sometimes we encounter a liberal who tries briefly to stand up against the lunatic tendencies of his philosophical peers.
Nearly a half-century ago, Daniel Patrick Moynihan tried to explain to his fellow liberals that the socio-economic problems afflicting black America could not be solved by increasing handouts or other standard bureaucratic interventions of welfare agencies. In his 1965 report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, Moynihan sought to explain these problems in far greater depth than was acceptable to liberals who had become accustomed to addressing all such issues through the prism of “civil rights.”
Moynihan’s report made him a target of the Left, which memorably accused him of “blaming the victim,” as if assigning blame for a problem were more important than identifying the problem. The Left wanted to blame Evil Racist Capitalist Amerikkka for everything that was wrong with the black community, and Moynihan’s attempt to provide a more helpful explanation — to address a significant and relatively recent increase in what he accurately called a “tangle of pathology” in black urban culture — was condemned and suppressed.
This, as Kay Hymowitz explained in 2005, was the beginning of 40 years of lies, and keeping these lies alive is still the goal of the Left. The fact that the Left’s lies do nothing to help the children of Angel Adams is one of those facts we’re not supposed to notice.
UPDATE: Thanks to the clever reader who located this recent update on the perpetually victimized Angel Adams:
McElroy said a pair of officers attempted to question one of Angel’s sons about a rock throwing incident, when several family members, including Angel, her 21-year-old daughter, also named Angel, and two 13-year-olds attacked the officers.
It turned into such a “fracas” (to quote the news article) that police called for backup, and one of the backup officers used a taser on Ms. Adams, who was eight months pregnant with her 16th child.
She claimed to be the victim of “police brutality,” because she’s always got to be the victim of something other than her own stupidity, I guess.
UPDATE II (Smitty): Welcome, Instapundit readers!

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