Most obituaries carried by The Oregonian/OregonLive are written and submitted by family members.

Occasionally, the newsroom will write an obituary if someone was particularly prominent, such as with former Oregon Gov. Neil Goldschmidt. In those cases, the obituaries are considered news articles and must adhere to the usual journalistic tenets of completeness, balance and fairness.

For that reason, both the lead sentence of the Goldschmidt obituary and its headline included the fact of his sexual abuse of a girl and how the revelation had toppled his political career and ended his public life.

Rightly so.

It’s a news story, not a tribute. I suspect Goldschmidt knew how his obituary would begin, despite his many accomplishments.

Nevertheless, several readers angrily objected to our emphasis. “Don’t speak ill of the dead” is deeply ingrained for some, and the desire to shield surviving family members from shame or stigma motivates others. Don’t kick them when they’re down, in other words.

One man wrote: “Shame on you! Shame on you the self-righteous headline writer, and the equally mean-spirited editor who, in your divine wisdom or rather, lack thereof, decided to s**t on Neil Goldschmidt’s grave on Thursday’s front page.

“What he did was despicable, and was justifiably covered in the article, but to rub a dead man and surviving family members’ face in it with that headline has to be one of the all-time lows in yellow journalism.”

A woman wrote in: “Talk about yellow journalism. The Oregonian really is getting to be a sensationalized newspaper. Governor Goldschmidt did a lot of good things while he was in office. To have the headline include what could have been put in the write-up, was so unnecessary. Very poor decision.”

A few other readers thought the obituary dwelled too extensively on his accomplishments.

“Your article features how powerful this criminal was in local, state and federal politics in paragraph after fawning paragraph and the few lines that address his crimes are seeming only mentioned to explain why he was ‘retired’ and forced to spend time enjoying the French countryside on wealth obtained while in office,” a reader wrote. “Poor man even had his portrait taken down and banished to Gresham (gosh, the infamy!).

“Shame on whoever wrote this fluff piece of an obituary.”

The obituary was written in advance years ago — a common practice for newsmakers — by a now-former reporter. We did trim some of the background information as new reaction came in the day Goldschmidt died, June 12, including a sharply worded response from Sen. Ron Wyden. We also added perspective on the toll the abuse took on his victim, taken from previous reporting by then-columnist Margie Boule.

We looked hard at the text that day, knowing the obituary had been written more than a decade earlier. Editors sought balance between the terrible abuse of a young teen that caused Goldschmidt to be largely shunned from public life and also the undeniable historical place he held as a politician in Portland, Oregon and Washington, D.C.

To that aim, the obituary posted on OregonLive, as well as the headline, underwent many revisions. For instance, the first headline was too soft: “Neil Goldschmidt, former governor forever tainted by scandal, dies.”

That was rapidly updated to “Neil Goldschmidt, former governor forever tainted by sexual abuse of young girl, dies at 83.”

The final headline, rightly, ended up very direct: Neil Goldschmidt, Oregon former governor who sexually abused young girl, dies at 83.

“Thank you for publishing the Neil Goldschmidt death news the way it was presented,” one reader wrote. “So many different headlines could have been crafted. Gov. Goldschmidt’s life could be summarized very differently. Unfortunately, his actions destroyed another human being. This overshadows other accomplishments.

“Today is a tough day for all survivors who didn’t receive that same justice in the court of public opinion.”

The complaints about the obituary headline were nothing compared to the deserved criticism of our front-page headline when Goldschmidt confessed, which used his word “affair” to describe the sexual abuse. The victim said the abuse started when she was 13; Goldschmidt was in his 30s. We apologized then for the error and again in last Sunday’s editorial.

Goldschmidt’s death brought back many bad memories for me, a managing editor at the time The Oregonian failed to sufficiently respond to a solid tip about the abuse. Nigel Jaquiss at Willamette Week pursued the truth and was rewarded with a Pulitzer Prize for his exposé.

In the end, I think the obituary and headline struck the correct note. Readers are free to disagree, and several did.

One reader called the headline “cruel.” She wrote, “His contributions to this city and state are the important story, but you played to the salacious …. That part of his story did not define him.”

But that part of his story ultimately did define him, as it should in any moral universe. As I replied to one angry reader, “Respectfully, people who do not wish to be remembered as child molesters should not molest children.”