350-Pound Man Living as 'Adult Baby' Reserves Right to Collect Disability Checks

Redding, CA is a bit further north than most towns that find themselves in our wheelhouse of coverage -- nearly nuzzling the Oregon border, it's a good 550 miles away from Los Angeles. But there's a story going on up there that's so voyeuristically fascinating, we thought it bore telling on the grounds that, hey, we're all Californians.

Here's the way it goes:

Stanley Thornton, Jr., is 30 years old and calls Redding home. There, the 350-pound man dons a gigantic diaper, is bottle-fed by a retired nurse, plays with action figures, sucks a pacifier and wears onesies. He calls himself an "adult baby."

Earlier this year, Thornton appeared on the National Geographic show "Taboo" to showcase his lifestyle. He claims that he was abused as a child and suffers from PTSD, depression and bipolar disorder. For these problems, he collects disability, and so doesn't hold a job.

But here's the catch. On the NatGeo show (I know because I watched it), Thornton eloquently and thoughtfully described the lifestyle of an adult baby. He was featured designing and building extra large cribs for himself, and it later came out that he set up and runs a website that serves as a community for others living as adult babies.

When Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, Republican and defender of justice, caught wind of all this, he was not happy. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that Coburn wrote a letter to Inspector General Patrick O'Carroll, which read, in part:

In response, Thornton sent a letter to the Washington Times -- the paper that ran Coburn's letter -- threatening suicide if his disability was taken away:

It seems as though the threat of suicide trumps the sense of injustice that rattled Coburn to the bone: according to the New York Daily News, Thornton recently received a letter from Social Security stating that his disability checks would continue to arrive.

And so, the Redding saga continues...