Yes, yes he is.

http://boingboing.net/2011/11/03/judge-whose-daughter-released-video-of-him-beating-her-suspended-from-bench-during-judicial-investigation.html#comment-356401307

I watched, I dunno, about half of the video a day or two ago. My guts knotted up and I broke out into a flop sweat and then I turned it off. I got the idea. And it triggered memories.

Growing up with abuse means you live in a different world than other kids in your community. You have trouble relating to other people, children and adults. You can’t read people, don’t know if you should trust them, and you desperately want to trust them. Whether you can articulate it or no, you ache to be loved. Because the people who have brought you into this world are incapable of love. They tell you they love you. They tell you they love you as they hit you, shame you, frighten you, control you and generally do everything they can to break your spirit, break your heart. They tell you they are doing it for your own good.

You might, if you are a strong or feckless child, argue. You might point out that none of the other children you know are treated by their parents in such a harsh manner. It will not make a difference.

Abusive parents like to isolate their kids. Abusive people isolate their spouses and partners. If you have one parent who is an active abuser and another who allows it to happen or rationalizes it, chances are that passive partner was raised in a household of abuse. The creepy pathology seems normal to them. I believe the passive parent is less guilty than the active abuser. But I do not give them a free pass. When you enter into a relationship with an abuser, they start out by charming you. They suss you out and sum you up and mirror back to you the values you hold dear. Then, sometimes over a period of years, they start manipulating and twisting things. Think of the lobster in the pot with the water slowly heating to a boil. Still, there comes a time when everyone in an abusive relationship realizes things are terribly wrong. And some folks stay, some folks have had their wings clipped so severely that they stay. I pity those folks… if they are childless. People who have children with abusers, well, I think  if they do not risk everything to get those kids away from the abuser, then they are criminal.

If your baby somehow ends up sitting on the train tracks and the train is coming, you MUST do everything in your power to get that baby to safety, including sacrificing yourself.

I was raised by abusive parents. I did not grow up to be an abuser, nor was I a victim in outside relationships from the get go, but for years I had a very high bullshit threshold. As an abused child, you are not simply chattel. You are raised to be meat, to be a victim. In middle age, I got hoodwinked. I got totally conned. I fell into a relationship with a particularly charismatic abuser. Payed a big price for it too: home, health and career. I had PTSD for five years afterwards. And honey, I ain’t never gonna be the same. So be it. Life goes on.

But some good came of it too. I’m what, in “The World According to Garp”, is referred to as predisastered. I’ve lost everything once already. I understand something about survival. In these times, that’s important. 

And I learned a lot about abusers and abuse. It’s mental illness folks. Not the kind you can cure, either. These people are personality disordered. And if it sounds like I am stereotyping, lumping all abusers into one big pile, you are right. These behaviors are the result of some kind of internal malfunction that results in horrible behaviors so consistent that, if you were to interview a number of different victims, their harrowing experiences would start to sound like reruns.

The DSM gets rewritten every some years. There are political considerations and behind the scenes decisions that move things in and out of the official taxonomy of mental illnesses. Call them psychopaths, call them sociopaths, call them people with antisocial personality disorders. It doesn’t matter. The years march on and abusers keep on abusing. Meanwhile, we, as a society, completely and utterly fail to stop it.

You waste time wondering about the logic behind the judge’s actions. He, like all abusers, has a very flexible sense of reality, of what is reasonable, what is fair. To justify his aberrant emotional needs, he will twist and fold his rationales like a pretzel, like a moebius strip and then some. To be in a relationship with one of his ilk, to have a man like that for a father means you live your life strapped into a rollercoaster designed by Dr. Caligari. If you want to survive the ride with any chance of escape, with any shred of your sanity, you stop paying much attention to their explanations. They’re just plain sick people.

If you are following the belt-swinging judge story at all, out in the tubes of the interwebs, you’ll read posts questioning the victim and her motives. Not so much here. BB readers are brighter than average and have the sense to realize that you can both abuse someone and buy them a car. You can be rich and abusive. Part of the game abusive parents play is they give you stuff and they take it away.

And the abuse cycle is like a tide. When you are weak, they abuse you. When you are strong, they back off and even charm you. You can even start to wonder if it wasn’t so bad. But weaken again and they will attack again, if you are in range. If you are strong and they are weak and you come back to help them, they may still attack. Probably the most vivid memory I have of my father is this: We were at the hospital because he was having a stroke. He was writhing and I was trying to keep him from falling off the bed. It was difficult. He was a big fat man and I am a small slight woman and he kept swinging at me.

He kept saying, “Come closer Pip, so I can hit you.”

The nurse came in and saw what was going on and took me aside. She told me she saw this a lot. Abuse laid bare in the intensive care ward.

“Usually people try and hide it, but you can’t help but see it. We walk into the room and the family mask comes down. He knows he is trying to hurt you. Don’t subject yourself to this. We can secure him so that he will not fall. Go get some sleep.”

I almost cried because she did not blame me. The rest of my family would have accepted Dad’s behavior and shamed me if I objected. I had been out of his house for almost two decades, but that was a pivotal moment for me.

“Thank you,” I said. “Strap the bastard down. I’m going home.”

Our collective inclination to blame the victim is part of what hinders our ability to make headway on the roots of abuse. Another is our cultural assumption is that mommy and daddy know best. Especially in conservative circles, there is much flag waving and shield rattling on the subject of parental rights. One of the major priorities of religious conservatives is their right to control their children to the point of isolating them from so much as another point of view. So many toxic belief systems are protected this way.

It’s about patriarchy. It’s about control, baby, control. Kiddies (and wives) are chattel. Surely by now, in the midst of our descent into neofeudalism, you’d have that figured out? The laws, the courts, the media, are all about supporting those in power. That includes parents. The world is a series of nesting hierarchies. Rotten at the bottom means rotten at the top. Toxic at the micro level means poison in the macro too.

Abused kids are at the bottom of the 99%, even when they live in the most affluent of homes.

Child abuse makes people uncomfortable. Got a neighbor who is weird and controlling with his children? What do you do? You aren’t seeing him hitting them or fondly them. Indeed he might never even touch them. But you hear his tone when he speaks to them. You see them struggle to fit in with the other children. You suspect something is not right. But what do you do? What can you do? Not fucking much.

And why in hell has this never been a priority? All the gum flapping about family values, what is it about anyway? Don’t look to the right. They do not care about the world they leave for their own descendents. These are not the people who are going to give a damn about the children of strangers.

I blame a good hunk of it on religions. Not in the sense that they promote abuse (although many of them do), but in that they have taken on the role of dealing with toxic behavior. Sin. WTF is sin? An abuser abuses. An abuser rides some kind of positive feedback loop from controlling and hurting others. Don’t tell me an abuser is going to find a way out of that loop via prayer, via the intercession of Jesus, Mary or Buddha. Not going to happen. They don’t just pull up their socks and reform. Can a diabetic kick his pancreas into action by way of moral fortitude? No, I thought not.

So really, I’m actually blaming the way we let religions take a leadership role in dealing with abuse situations. Because they are woefully unequipped to deal with the problem. How many thousands of years have they had? How much abuse have they stopped? Let’s not even talk about child brides, fondled altar boys and infibulation.

The only thing that will make a lick of difference is understanding the mental disorders that cause this. Science, science, SCIENCE. It is the only thing we can trust to do the job. It is the thing that has made the biggest impact on human lives, on the whole planet, for good and for ill. You want to make a difference to abused kids? Push for research into the mental disorders of abusive people.

Figure that one out and it will be money well spent. Figure that one out and you’ll cut back on all kinds of horrible mental disorders. Figure that one out and you have a chance to cure all kinds of people with empathy deficiencies who do the rest of us harm: abusers, warmongers, gangsters, bankers, media moguls, clergy, and even neocons.

Figure that one out and we’ll have a fighting chance to clean up all the different kinds of mess we are in now, a chance to survive.
 
Have I said this before? Hold up a finger for every time I’ve made this rant. Hmmm, fingers waving like sea anemone tentacles in the tide. So, yeah, just ramblings. And not proofed. I never proof anything unless I am being paid for it.

all my best,

Pipenta

is this the dead horse thread?

As in beating one?

Judge Adams may still be disbarred, and I hope that the doxers. help us all make his life a living hell forever. Dude lives a 2-3 hour drive away form me. So far I have resisted temptation.

BTW, Gotta give my props to the Houston Police Department. Y’all showed New York and Oakland how it should be done. Nice to see how public safety and free speech don’t need to be made into conflict at the Occupy Houston Divestment March this morning. Thank you.

And thanks also to our mayor and council. Yes, we are breaking the law with the camp in Tranquility Park, but understand that our constitutional rights to free speech and assembly are more important than the laws that say we can’t stay in the park overnight. Thank you for giving us the chance to show we can occupy Tranquility  in a sanitary and orderly fashion.

Either way, this judge is SOL.

is this the dead horse thread?

Can we please stop with the “addition”-jokes? A child was viciously beaten.

Yes, but how many times?

Blamed his bouts of violence on “addition”?

I have a similar problem after having a bad childhood experience with a subtrahend.

It’s not often we see a detailed public explanation for why some obvious criminal will not be tried. I think they did a good job of showing that they understand the severity of the crime but legally their hands are tied.

That’s something, at least.

I agree with the posters that are surprised at what we see of the judge’s lifestyle.  Judges generally make good money — but not that good.  Unless they left private practice at a large firm, they are far from the 1%.   Still, it appears he is a senior judge in the county and probably has been on the bench for many years.  So maybe he can afford to keep his daughter in a Mercedes and support her – but it does seem fishy.

Finally, I admittedly don’t know anything about TX statues of limitations, but I’m surprised there isn’t some way to bring charges.  I hope this isn’t just an excuse by a DA who wants to avoid having all this judge’s judgements reviewed.

What a prick.

There’s nothing wrong with working at a video store. An adult man wailing on a young girl and calling it ‘discipline’, however, is very wrong.

The point is:  that Mercedes given to Hillary sounds like a bribe, and it sounds very much as though Bad-Dad Adams is on the take.  This guy needs an audit more than anyone I ever heard of.  If he can manage a Mercedes and a substance abuse habit on a municipal salary, he’s getting bribes, either big, plenty, or both.

We need to be very worried about all of the abused children and youth whose computers and camera phones are, even as we speak, being taken away from them.  In any schools even slightly more affluent than inner-city, laptops or netbooks should be a requirement. 

Unfortunately, these godbot fundamentalist luddites would probably commence to “home-schooling” their unfortunate offspring.

Could be he’s so dumb he couldn’t count how many times he hit her.

Specifically, the ones accused of child abuse.

As a side note, anyone convicted under this guy since the beating should appeal, cuz it’s obvious he is unfit to wear those robes.  This man is incapable of rational, reasoned thought.

The guy HAS to be on drugs.