Women and Submission

Date: August 17, 2025

Author: Bobbi Holmes

It wasn’t until I joined TikTok about three years ago that I realized I had been raised in a bubble for most of my life. I had never stepped into far-right Christian spaces, where the women are taught to submit to their husbands, and girls who showed their legs and shoulders were held responsible for the actions of boys.

My parents never taught me that boys were superior to girls. They paid for my college education—back during a time when it was affordable. Had I been one of those women who discovered the man they married was abusive, my parents would never have told me I needed to try being a better wife. Hell no, my daddy would have never stood by while someone abused one of his daughters.

Dad had been raised by his grandparents and regularly attended a fundamental Christian church as a child. As an adult, he was an agnostic who said the Bible was written by smart men trying to control people. Mom was raised Christian Science and after she married Dad, she stopped going to church, started going to doctors, and sporadically sent my sister and me to Christian Science Sunday school, where we learned about a loving God, not one who we needed to fear.

Now back to TikTok, and why I said I was raised in a bubble. When first exploring the platform, I stumbled upon videos of people deconstructing. They were typically Mormons and Evangelical Christians. And once you’ve watched a few of those videos, the algorithm kicks in.

For a perspective on where I am coming from, I am a Boomer, yet some born the same year as me (1954) call themselves Generation Jones. I have only one sibling, a sister who I’m close to. Growing up, Mom always said Dad only wanted girls. Now that I am much older, I wonder if that is true or just something Mom said to make us feel good about ourselves. However, once I asked Dad if he ever regretted not having a son to carry on his last name. He laughed and said there are enough Johnsons out there; it wasn’t a problem.

While Dad was of the generation that believed classes like Home Economics was for girls, and Auto Shop for boys, it didn’t stop him from teaching me how to change a tire when I got my first car, nor did it keep him out of the kitchen. Dad was typically the one who cooked the main courses of our holiday meals, and while I remember him making homemade pies, I can’t remember Mom ever making one.

When I hear on TikTok how pastors in conservative churches teach the young girls about keeping their shoulders covered and hemlines lengthen, so as not to temp the boys, I remember how I spent my summers as a teenager, working in my family’s marina on Lake Havasu. I pumped gas for boats, waited on customers in our small lake-side country store, scooped minnows and waterdogs, and dumped boxes of redworms and night crawlers out to make sure they were alive before selling them to fishermen—all the while wearing a bikini. Hey, it was Havasu with summer temperatures well over a hundred, and the old store only had a swamp cooler, which meant we had to jump off the docks into the lake periodically during the day to cool off.

Despite my skimpy attire, I managed to graduate from high school without having sex, although I kissed my share of boys. Hey, I liked to kiss, and it was the sixties and seventies. My point being, I wasn’t raised to feel ashamed of my body, yet I was taught there were consequences for my actions, and since I intended to go to college, getting pregnant was not on my agenda. Marriage was also not on my immediate to-do-list. Unlike what right wing podcaster Charlie Kirk yammers on about regarding young women needing to find a husband, I didn’t go to college to find a husband. I went to get an education. When I did decide to marry my husband, it was because he was the person I wanted to spend my life with, not just because I wanted to get married.

Growing up, during my first thirteen years, Mom was a traditional stay at home mom (SAHM). She took care of the home and helped Dad in his general contracting business. Yet, unlike how I hear SAHM described by some of the younger generations on social media, Dad didn’t treat Mom like a child. They were partners. The money he earned was theirs, and they never taught me I needed to “submit” to my husband someday.

In today’s current political climate, we are seeing the prominent platforming of far-right “MAGA” Christians. One of these is Joel Webbon, a Christian Nationalist pastor from Texas. He talks about how his wife needs to ask his permission before she can read a book. Basically, he treats her like a child.

Maybe it’s the absurdity of it all for me. I can’t imagine my mom ever asking Dad for permission in what she could read. And my husband would look at me like I had lost my mind if I asked for his permission to read a specific book.

Plus, Webbon is a young whippersnapper from this old woman’s perspective. The boy is younger than my daughter, and he presumes to be such a wise sage that he can guide the women in his life. Malarkey.

I believe—and I am serious, not just being a smart ass—that wanting to submit to your husband, or wanting your wife to submit to you is nothing more than a sexual kink wrapped up in a false interpretation of the scriptures. While I don’t kink shame—what goes on between two consenting adults is their business—when people like Webbon or that women-shouldn’t-vote-Pet-Hegseth’s-Pastor-Doug-Wilson, wants to legislature their fetishes into the mainstream I have a problem.

Now, if you want to argue I am wrong about this being a false Biblical interpretation, stop. It doesn’t really matter whose interpretation is accurate. The last time I looked, the First Amendment prohibits our government from establishing a religion. Therefore, if your reason for wanting to take away women’s right to vote is based on your interpretation of the Bible, I suggest you reread the First Amendment.

However, if you believe a penis means a person possesses more intelligence and wisdom than a person with a uterus, you are in fact an idiot. There are brilliant and capable men—just as there are brilliant and capable women. There are also incompetent and mentally deficient men and women.

So yeah, I can’t imagine telling my granddaughter that someday she needs to submit to her husband, and he is the head of the household, the one to make all the final decisions.

And you know what? I equally would not tell my grandson that someday his wife needs to submit to him, and he needs to make the final decisions.

That is equally damning to both men and women. I remember back before I was married, thinking it was not fair for men to shoulder the financial responsibility of the family alone. I never wanted to marry someone so he could take care of me. I only wanted to marry when I found a partner I could spend my life with. Fortunately, I found that.

If you treat your spouse like a child—if you allow your spouse to treat you as a child, well, that is just weird. And kind of creepy. But if you are both of legal age, it is your business. But please, stop trying to push that on the rest of the country. It’s just icky.

Why should a classroom display the Ten Commandments?

Date: August 12, 2025

Author: Bobbi Holmes

Categories: Bobbi Ann Johnson Holmes

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States like Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas are passing laws to require the display of the Ten Commandments in classrooms. Not sure how all this is going to play out, considering the ongoing court challenges, as many believe this is a violation of the First Amendment.

But this blog post is not about the legality of a state requiring the posting of the Ten Commandments in public schools. What I want to know, why do they want to do this?

Seriously, why do many government officials—primarily in red states—want to post the Ten Commandments in the schools? What do they hope to accomplish? And have they even read the Ten Commandments?

The First Commandant says, “I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt have no other gods before me.”

That might be a little problematic; while Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) embrace the Ten Commandments, and theoretically the same god, all religions and belief systems in our country aren’t Abrahamic. In fact, our Vice President’s wife is Hindu. In the Hindu religion they recognize other gods and goddesses. So, will an observant student assume the Vice President’s wife is a sinner?

I also find it ironic that the people quick to ban books, because they don’t want their children to read about how Billy has two moms, have no problem with a poster where one of the rules is about not committing adultery.

I wonder, when one of the young children asks their teacher what adultery means, what exactly is the teacher supposed to say? In some Christian religions they believe anyone who is divorced and remarries is committing adultery. So, depending on how someone explains this rule to little Suzie, whose parents happen to be divorced and remarried to new spouses, she might go home thinking Mommy and Daddy are adulterers.

What will the teacher tell his or student who asks, what does it mean to covet your neighbor’s wife?

And what about the rule telling us to keep the Lord’s Day holy? Does that just mean going to church, or not watching football on Sunday, too? For the kids who don’t go to church, will they go home believing they are sinners? Is that what the people who are pushing this idea of posting the Ten Commandments want? Do they want to guilt a generation of children into begging their parents to attend church? Sounds a little like indoctrination to me.

Some of the other rules aren’t so problematic, such as telling us not to lie, kill, steal, and honoring our parents.

But I must admit, I’m anxious to see how high school students respond to the posting of the Ten Commandments, especially if they are anything like I was in high school. When I was an upperclassman in high school, I looked forward to the annual term paper, unlike many of my classmates. Of course, this meant I wanted an interesting topic. And now with the Internet—something I didn’t have for research when I was a high school student—how fun to write a term paper where I document which of the commandments high profile politicians broke. I argue our current president has broken at least nine.

So, what is the point of posting the Ten Commandments at schools?

Is it to bully and intimidate children whose families don’t worship in the same way these Christians do?

Is it to inspire better behavior from students? Yet, I am not sure how. If anything, it will list rules they can easily see people of power break daily and publicly, so what exactly does that teach them? That rules are not for everyone? That rules are to be broken? What?

I personally believe the only way we teach our children how to behave is by setting an example.

Growing up, my parents taught by example. They displayed empathy, worked hard, treated people generously, and showed us love. I didn’t steal from stores because I was afraid that I would get caught and Dad would whip my butt with a belt; I didn’t steal because I never wanted my parents to be disappointed in me, plus they instilled in me that it was simply wrong.

My parents taught by example, not by physical abuse, and not by posting a list of rules on the wall of our home. And if they did post rules, they wouldn’t be breaking them.

If we want to reduce violent crimes in this country and raise students to treat their classmates and teachers kindly, we need to teach empathy, not post religious doctrine on school walls, listing rules that many of those in power routinely break.

So yeah, to me it’s unclear as to the motive behind wanting to post the Ten Commandments in schools.

Now that Gay Pride Month is over, what do you think gay pride really means?

Date: July 1, 2025

Author: Bobbi Holmes

Categories: Bobbi Ann Johnson Holmes

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Without words I couldn’t do my job. I’m a writer. I’ve always taken a special interest in words. I remember in junior high school finding etymology fascinating. Even now, when writing a book, I will look up certain words to discover their origin and evolution.

It’s common for a word to have different meanings and connotations. The word gay, for example, when I was a little girl in the late fifties and early sixties, the most recognizable definition for the word was happy and lighthearted. In fact, my sister’s Bluebird troop called themselves, “The Gay Bluebirds.” No one giggled and thought about homosexuals.

In the following decades more and more people began seeing the word gay as a synonym for homosexual, and now I never hear gay used how it was when I was a child.

While words and their meanings often shift over time, as it did with the word gay, sometimes a group will highjack a word or phrase and intentionally tweak its meaning to misrepresent a group using the word or phrase. I believe that’s happened with the term Gay Pride.

Before I go on let me say I believe—with my full heart—gay people were born that way. It’s not something you can change like your hair color. I learned this lesson at a young age. We had this cousin who my sister and I had to babysit one time. He was a little boy, with two rough and tumble brothers, and the day we babysat him I knew, without a doubt that kid was gay. Fast forward a decade or so and my suspicions were confirmed.

This was back in the 1960s. If you wonder how I, a pre-teen, knew about gay people in the late sixties, it was because a close family friend of one of my best friends was a professional dancer. She gave us dance lessons, and I remember once we went to some event where a lot of her dancer friends were in attendance, and a lot of those dancer friends were men. Let’s just say, the topic came up.

Every family has someone who’s gay. My husband’s stepfather came from a large family, and two of his brothers were gay. It had nothing to do with them being groomed, it was simply the odds, considering he had something like eighteen siblings.

And please, don’t tell me it’s a sin. That may be part of your religion, but that only makes it a sin in your religion. If you call yourself a Christian, remember there are some Christian religions who don’t believe homosexuality is a sin, and some religious scholars say homosexuality wasn’t even mentioned in the Bible. And it certainly didn’t make God’s top ten rule list.

But I don’t want to argue religion. You have the right to your faith, but you don’t have the right to use your faith to endanger children.

I have read the suicide rate is four times higher for gay teens than straight teens. And considering the suicide rate is high for teens in general, that is a scary statistic. But gay teens don’t kill themselves because they are gay—they kill themselves because people around them bully them for being gay. Adults tell them they are sinners. Yet, they have no control over how they were born.

Praying away the gay or sending a teen to conversion therapy is going to make the teen feel worse about themselves. One study showed that during a 12 month period, 27% of young people in the LGBTQ community who were exposed to conversion therapy attempted suicide. The rate of suicide attempts for those who had not been exposed to that therapy was 9%. Therefore, sending your gay teen to conversion therapy makes it three times more likely he or she will attempt suicide.

So now, let’s get to the meaning of gay pride.

First, let’s look at the meaning of, “pride.” Pride is to take satisfaction or pleasure in one’s own achievement.

So, when a gay person is celebrating gay pride, do they see being gay as some achievement? Of course not, that would be silly. They were no more responsible for being gay than I am responsible for being straight.

When a gay person celebrates gay pride that simply means they have accepted who they are. They understand they have as much worth, value, and a right to happiness as anyone else. And that’s an achievement, because it’s hard to stand tall and accept yourself when people around you are knocking you down, trying to make you feel shame for something that you have no reason to feel shame for.

When straight people celebrate gay pride, they are conveying their acceptance, support, acknowledging to people in the gay community that everyone has the right to happiness.

The most asinine thing I hear some straight people say in response to Gay Pride is, “Why don’t we have straight pride?” That is beyond dense. I want to tell them, “You didn’t do anything to be straight, what do you have to be proud about?” And it doesn’t take courage to accept being straight. Being straight is the majority. Being straight is easy, in fact, plenty of gay kids, before they accept who they are, would rather be straight. Who wants all that hate?

And gay people aren’t shoving their gayness in your face. They are simply being who they were born to be. If you don’t freak out when you see a heterosexual couple holding hands, or kiss, or hug each other, then don’t get weird if you see a gay couple do it. Gay people exist. Gay pride is simply a gay person’s refusal to stay in the closet for your comfort.

Earlier in this post I mentioned there are gay people in every family. That is something I wish these gay pride mockers would consider. Each time they leave some anti-gay pride post on social media they are conveying to the gay people in their lives that they don’t believe they deserve the same happiness as straight people—that they are not accepted.

And that gay person in their life might be a son, daughter, grandchild, niece, nephew, friend’s child, anyone who is still in the closet, coming to terms with their truth, a truth they never asked for. Those thoughtless comments and lack of support might be enough to push a struggling gay teen to take their own life.

Is that what you really want?

Plus, it is dangerous to keep gay people in the closet—especially gay men. And I am quite serious when I say this. When a gay man stays in the closet, it means he has not accepted himself. People who can’t accept who they are often come to hate themselves. People who hate themselves often do bad and hurtful things to others. They might turn their hate on women who they blame for their inability to find them sexually attractive. They turn their hate on openly gay men, who they are jealous of for living their genuine life. If they are in Congress, they are more apt to make laws harmful to women and people in the LGBTQ community.

I honestly believe we would be a happier and safer world if we made gay people feel safe and accepted out of the closet. And that’s the real reason for gay pride.

And one more thing, about those rainbow flags in classrooms. Those aren’t recruitment flags. They aren’t signaling to children to switch teams. For one thing, that’s not really a thing. The purpose of a pride flag is to signal to students that all are accepted, and the bullying will not be tolerated in the classroom. It signals the classroom is a safe place.

Of course, perhaps we need to remove the pride flags from the classrooms to toughen up kids. After all, classrooms aren’t really a safe place anymore, not with the number of school shootings in this country. And there seems to be more attention on keeping rainbow flags and books on diversity out of the classroom than guns.

While we are at it, perhaps we need to stop having the kids saying the Pledge of Allegiance. After all, promising Liberty and Justice for all seems a little disingenuous these days, and no reason to have America’s children recite something that’s not true.

Well, I guess this blog post veered off course. Let me climb off my soap box and get back to work before you all start pelting me with metaphoric eggs.