Getting some clarity on "never again"

In a story entitled "Early Decision: Will new advances in prenatal testing shrink the ranks of Jews negroes girls babies with Down syndrome?," this week's Time magazine presents a sensitive and reasonable exploration of the decisions facing parents with a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome. That is, if "sensitive" and "reasonable" can be sanely applied to an article which never mentions the nowhere-more applicable term "genocide."

Why would Down syndrome babies not be wanted in our society? Because they won't grow up as smart as other people, that's why. What better reason to exterminate a class of people? At any rate, they certainly won't be bright enough to make the careful distinction between bad Nazi eugenics and good college-educated 21st-century American eugenics.

Let's just admit the obvious: the next time an American politician says "Never again" on Holocaust Remembrance Day, what he or she means is "Let us never again kill six million Jews in Germany in the 1930s and 40s." I'm glad we all learned that important moral lesson.