Neglected news out of the Crazy from the Heat Department is word that the global overpopulists are in a terrific snit because soccer superstar David Beckham and his wife, Victoria, dare to continue producing children. Talk about a crime against nature.

Fortunately, as The Wall Street Journal noted, the Beckhams had the good sense not to get hot under the collar after the birth of their fourth child drew a scolding from Population Matters, a tone-deaf British nonprofit.

Heritage’s Chuck Donovan quickly rose to the Beckhams’ defense. Donovan penned an op-ed for the McClatchy-Tribune wire before Simon Ross, wiggy chief exec of Population Matters, could catch his breath from all the trash talking.

“The ‘optimum pop’ people are relentless,” Donovan writes, adding:

“They want mandatory ‘free’ contraceptives in every U.S. insurance plan, non-negotiable federal dollars for Planned Parenthood and more support for abortion globally. They’re willing to slur and slander the David and Victoria Beckhams of the world for loving and wanting to have children.”

The Beckhams “are very bad role models with their large families,” Ross had huffed to the British press. “There’s no point in people trying to reduce their carbon emissions and then increasing them 100 percent by having another child.”

Using the ridiculous to illustrate the serious, Donovan reasons:

“Set aside Ross’ appallingly bad math. The most that one more child in the Beckham household could do to their carbon footprint is increase it by one-sixth. But Ross has plenty of sympathizers among elite political figures, both in the United Kingdom and around the world…

“Today, astonishingly low birth rates prevail in countries across Europe.   Greece, a nation struggling to maintain its welfare state, has an estimated total fertility rate this year of 1.38 children per woman. … Embracing the darkest visions of the ‘population bomb’ movement, many nations in the West saw their proposed solutions detonate on their own shores.  The role of declining population in making their social contracts unaffordable receives too little attention in the debt and deficit debates.”

But back to the ridiculous. Not only that, Chuck, did Simon Ross’ lot ever think how culturally bereft we’d be without the youngest or next-to-youngest of many a family?

For starters, no Mark Twain, who was the sixth of seven children. And no Stephen Colbert, youngest of 11. The late great Michael Jackson (King of Optimum Pop) was the eighth child of Joseph and Katherine Jackson. Janet, their youngest, was No. 10.

The Left – and the Academy Awards – would be a far more serious place without Jim Carrey or Billy Crystal.

With the population curve bending toward zero, all the more reason to applaud parents who, as Donovan writes, “are willing to defy the crowd and — like the Beckhams — bend it back.”