Equality Matters has a run down of Todd Starnes new book:

Portraying himself as a down-home Southerner who loves sweet tea (a fact he reminds readers of no fewer than nine times), Duck Dynasty, guns, and his hardline Southern Baptist faith, beneath Starnes’ folksy veneer is a far more venomous culture warrior.

What particularly rouses Starnes’ ire about the state of contemporary America is that it’s led by, as he pointedly notes, “Barack Hussein Obama.” Starnes laments throughout the book that Obama’s America is no longer the one in which in grew up - a country he depicts as more wholesome and unapologetically Christian, when women knew their place and gay people weren’t being as obnoxious with all that equal rights stuff:

I grew up in a much simpler time - when blackberry was a pie and dirty dancing meant somebody forgot to clean out the barn for the square dance. It was a time when father still knew best - when the girls were girls and the men were men. I grew up in a time when a rainbow was a sign of God’s promise, not gay rights.

Which begs a question - just how old is Todd Starnes?

If you go by his picture and hazard a guess, he is in his Forty’s? Fiftys? Sixties?

If he is in his sixties - he would have been born between 1954 and 1947. Which would have put him in puberty right around 1965. Here is what went for popular culture in 1965:

Sorry, if you were not one to be interested in the world at large - maybe this would be an image of the world in 1965:

Oh no, sorry, that is a cover of Esquire magazine with a woman shaving, circa 1965, you’d likely still have to read for that to have been part of your culture.

Maybe this is more an icon of his time:

That is Alabama, circa 1965.

And that is a Klan rally in Georgia, sometime around 1965.

And those are white people, in Selma, Alabama in 1965, standing to enforce the tradition that the southern apartheid we know as ‘Jim Crow’

Here is one thing Todd Starnes would not have seen in his budding teen years, circa 1965, in the south:

Those are wholesome African Americans dancing, which he would not have seen because those white men in the aforementioned picture, enforced racial segregation with brutality, even and often, death.

So. How old is Todd Starnes? you have to go a very very long way back in the south’s history to find a time that was truly wholesome for all its residents. Maybe back to pre-colonial days.

If Todd Starnes is that old - maybe this should be his next book:

Todd Starnes: Blueberry Pie - A Christian Guide to Anti-Ageing