You offer a good explanation .   But it gets back to the main issue---do they support censorship or not ?  If they fear a story might be controversial , why make a big story out of it ?  They chose to let Wolhforth tell us what he thinks about the gay native lady---but think so little of us to hear what we paying readers think.    I realize monitoring the comments has been time consuming for them , but thought the new system eased that load.  They wanted the new system to bring more people into the conversation and it has done so big time.  When you don't let readers comment because you fear what they might say--that's censorship.