"Comments stand on their own merit" ≠ "all opinions are equal".

If comments can stand purely on their own merits, then one person's opinions must be equal to another person's — otherwise something outside of the comment matters. If the only thing that matters is what you say and not the actual expertise that causes you to say it, then your doctor telling you "You need to go see a surgeon right away" is equal to a drunk bum telling you "You need to go see a surgeon right away." That is obviously not true. Thus comments cannot stand solely on their own merits. QED

What you're saying now is reasonable (though I still don't agree that HN needs identities).

Your previous comment read as implying that from "all opinions are equal" followed "creationism is as valid as evolution", which is a total straw man since we're here using "equal" to mean "equal irrespective of the person advocating" not "equal irrespective of intrinsic merit". It is not because creationism is advocated by creationists that creationism is a poor theory.

There is no intrinsic merit to the statements "God created the world" and "Animals evolved from simpler lifeforms and ultimately from non-living compounds" — their merit is entirely extrinsic, deriving from research done by scientists. It's ignoring these extrinsic factors and "letting the statements stand on their own merits" that leads to creationism being taught in school — that literally is the way the school board members usually put it. That's what I'm getting at: The more context you get for a claim, the better. In technical matters, the identity of the person telling you something is very important, because the value of an expert's opinion is extrinsic to the actual words that comprise the opinion.