I wish I could argue with you on this point, but while I think no group should be beyond criticism and that includes “protected groups”, I would tend to agree that some of the posts I’ve seen in the past are probably over a line and as such I can understand why people would just say “naw, let’s just not federate that”.
There are lots of good posts on the site even – they cover a lot of stuff we should be talking about such as crony capitalism and corruption, but it doesn’t take many really bad posts gone completely unmanaged and unchallenged to turn an instance into a superfund site, even for reasonably liberal people who want to allow talking about controversial topics.
I think that’s a much better argument than just painting the site and everything and everyone on it with a broad brush. “There’s specific stuff on that site that they find acceptable but we don’t and there’s been instances where the users there brought their unacceptable stuff into the other communities so we don’t want to federate with them to maintain our own community standards” is difficult to argue with. It’s a well-reasoned point that shows everyone is thinking for themselves which is all I ask.
And yeah, I saw OP was from beehaw afterward and realized that they were probably around a bit before all this.