My inclination is to be very careful about using the names of dead soldiers on a political website in diaries. Even if this is done to memorialize them, it can create problems.
Today I read a diary where someone called for the immediate banning of anyone who posts an anti-war comment in an IGTNT diary. That's dangerous, and the thinking behind it can also be dangerous in my opinion. In this age of blogs and instant information, privacy I think is an important issue, especially when it comes to dead soldiers, their families, and a period of time involving personal grieving.
Not every military family supports their son or daughter's decision to join the military. Many if not most military families are split on the issue. Many families support the idea of service, but not the wars in question. Some support both. Some neither. There's simply no way to know with every soldier whether the mother and/or father, siblings, grandparents, children, husbands, wives, etc... whether they support the war, whether they blog, whether they may even be here now, reading a diary they found on google about their loved one.
These people deserve their privacy. They deserve their freedom online. They shouldn't be banned for posting anti-war comments in diaries about their own loved ones. They shouldn't have to identify themselves in order to do so.
This idea about the level of control wrt what's posted in particular kinds of diaries here on Kos is dangerous. The policy would allow the verbal harassment, denunciation, even banning of people who come to this website to read about a loved one, post their political views on a political website, and/or condemn the war that killed the person they care about.
This isn't acceptable. There's no way to know who the people are who post on a blog, and I don't think it's right to force the family members of those who've died in Iraq to ID themselves on this website if they want to post a statement that's critical of the Iraq war in a diary about their child, husband, or wife. How these people memorialize their loved ones is up to them. If they want to post an anonymous comment on a blog article that's the number one item on google about this person, then I think it's really sad that their comment would be ridiculed and shouted down, even hidden by this community.
People here on DK need to really rethink how they treat anonymous people in certain situations. Some of the family members of these soldiers are here on this website for all we know. DK really needs to be careful about how they handle these situations with anti-war comments in IGTNT diaries, especially if it wants to use the names of these soldiers in memorial diaries on such a politically charged website. In my opinion, only the families of these people should be holding memorials, because they have the right to control how that memorial should be. Whatever the IGTNT diaries are, I would argue they should not be thought of as memorials.
Just imagine if Andrew Breitbart were smart enough to get the grieving mother of a dead soldier to come here and post an anti-war comment in a diary about her own son. And then Daily Kos shouts her down, cusses her out, and she's hiderated to the point that she's banned.
Just imagine how the media would eat that one up and what it'd do to this website.