Irish-American Democrats, such as Joe Kennedy Sr.’s family of eleven, were noted for both their fecundity and their political ambitions. Not surprisingly, liberal Protestant Republican dynasties such as the Rockefellers and Bushes often advocated family planning in the name of conservation.

Progressive Protestants had their reasons for disliking Catholic societies. Pre-1960 French Canadians inspired in American Republicans much the same horror with which advanced English thinkers such as George Orwell contemplated the Irish: as fertile, feckless, and priest-ridden.

It’s usually said that JFK’s narrow victory in the 1960 election marked America’s final acceptance of Catholics. More likely, this happened three years later: November 22, 1963. JFK’s martyrdom made him a permanent American legend, thereby ending the Protestant-Papist rivalry at the level of mythos. Conversely, Protestant acknowledgment of Catholic legitimacy reduced the urge among Catholics to wage their expensive War of the Cradle.

The peaceful resolution of the Catholic-Protestant ethnic struggle in the wake of JFK’s death made room for the sudden emergence of the non-ethnic Generation Gap of the 60s, which first became vivid with The Beatles’ arrival in February 1964.

Later, the rise of the cult of diversity (society-sanctioned ancestor worship for almost everybody except NASCAR fans) undermined the Generation Gap and made population issues unmentionable. As early as 1967, the NAACP’s Pittsburgh branch was accusing Planned Parenthood of “genocide” for handing out birth-control pills in the ghetto. As white Democrat birthrates fell, Rockefeller Republicans lost interest in what was becoming a racially “controversial” issue.

But that doesn’t mean that population policy isn’t important anymore. We’re just more obtuse.

The newish conventional wisdom is that poor children tend to grow up to be unintelligent because their parents don’t speak to them with college-educated vocabularies. To remedy this, we are informed that Ivy-educated daycare workers must relieve the poor parents of the ordeal of raising their own children. What nobody notices is that this would merely provide the poor parents with the time and energy to breed more.