You had me until the "groomer" version of "think of the children."

Concern over safety (especially of the children) is a political weapon. A ridiculously overused one. I think that's part of why people react the way they do.

I am not a libertarian, but in recent decades safety has been the excuse for the erosion of our civil liberties in the US, so I can understand why their feathers would be ruffled by this.

I am not so sure safety is a thing we should value or work towards in general. I'd claim something like "well-being" on an individual and a group level would be more important. But safety and well-being are both still vague abstract generalities, so not terribly useful yet. We need stronger definitions or frameworks for those concepts and we need to talk about them as applied in specific instances.