The sad truth is that the right are pandering to homophobia because it’s a vote getter for them not because they really care about it.
A huge portion of religious people believe that homosexuality is an especially dangerous sin because it’s a social contagion, they see the increased popularity of gay things and the decreased respect for religion as a clear sign that the devil is winning and faithful, godfearing society is collapsing. To an extent they’re right, modern views on self determination and respect for others is anathema to Christian society as it’s been for over a thousand years - to the faithful it’s like saying the sky is pink or fish live in trees.
There are of course now grifters using homophobia to draw people into their political ideologies but it’s generally people from homophobic families in homoohobic communities that get drawn into it, it’s easy to forget that when you see a twenty something year old kid making homophobic comments it’s likely at his age his dad was going ‘queer bashing’ for fun with his friends and certainly wouldn’t have hesitated to beat up a gay person in a bar or in the street if encountered.
Even big artists like Eminem had deeply homophobic messages in his music, now that’s backtracked and he’s friends with Elton - this isn’t entirely because he’s grown as a person but because at the start of this century it was unconscionable that rap or hip hop could be anything but homophobic. School kids used the word ‘gay’ to describe uncool or disliked things so commonly it was even part of my own vocab despite being raised in a progressive and accepting family in a liberal area.
Things have changed so much just in my adult lifetime but it’s not universal, a lot of religious and conservative people see the ‘gay agenda’ exactly as you see the ‘homophobic agenda’ in that they believe it’s political narrative being pushed just to destabilize morally virtuous power structures to allow corrupt and evil people to take power and steal money.
Companies that shoehorn a poorly written gay character into everything for the sake of inclusivity feel like a pandering cash grab to me but to the homophobic Christian it feels like asymmetric warfare from a deranged and selfish elite hellbent on ruining western society.
It’s a hugely complex issue for me, I honestly have no idea what the best thing for the greater good is. Forcing things too hard can be painful for those unready which causes resentment and reaction but holding back and allowing non-violent homophobic behavior to exist in our society is hurtful to those struggling to find snd accept themselves. (For example being 17 and trying to reconcile popular music explicitly talking about how your unexplored sexual desires are disgusting, realizing you have to make the choice between humiliation and self denial - and this is probably a big part of other emotional troubles which can lead to rejection of otherwise sensible social norms leading to unhealthy drug use, self endangering behavior and other things that still have lasting damage to my life to this day)
I don’t know what will solve these complex issues in our society, maybe making certain concessions to mildly homophobic sections of society would stop driving them into full on culture war crusaders? Maybe highlighting that it’s not only possible but probable to be gay and boring would help ease the anxiety? I actually kinda think straight pride type events and companies pandering to heterosexuals could be normalized and accepted more - not in a way that pits them against everyone else but more of a everyone gets a party kinda way. Stop heteros feeling attacked or at least make those who want to paint that picture looking silly.
It’s sad to admit but humanity is naturally kinda selfish and shitty, bigotry and group thinking is as natural and easy to us as breathing while compassion and understanding takes effort and the right circumstances to flourish.
I’d rather see mods have less power not more, the idea that they could choose which comments are visible or have more power to downvote is scary to me.
And mod tools designed to favor ‘good’ posters are already misused all over the internet, sure you think you’ll only use it correctly but everyone thinks that while they tell themselves ‘this person posted two comments I didn’t like, they must be a bot or shill or troll so I’ll protect my communit by muting them’
What we need is to take the power to delete or hide comments away from community owners unless they’re illegal content and switch to voluntary mod layers where people choose which mod teams to enable - that way one community can have several different mod lagers and I can choose if I want to view it unmoderated or filtered by whichever groups I trust - maybe some people want heavy handed moderation to get rid of crude language or hot button comments while others are fine with that but want all jokes removed.