"...Try not to be too frightened or alarmed by this..."
This is a silly thing to say. I'm not "frightened" by homos. I'm disgusted by them. It's disgusting and like all things disgusting we should try to have less of it. We certainty shouldn't promote it. You say we have always had it, true, but we have always had psychopathic murderers but I don't see anyone saying we should "understand" them. We have always had Down's syndrome children but I don't see anyone saying we should try to have more. And we have always had people who are anti-social assholes but no one is saying we should just try to understand their assholyiness.
Now one of the "arguments" used is that we should be tolerant and blah, blah, blah, but as an average homos have been known to be anti-social, they have a much higher rate of molesting children and due to some of these facts many are on the fringes of society and they tend to promote things NOT the interest of the wider society on average. We can see, that openness to their way of life has not changed any of this one bit. In fact there is no fervid gun toting hunting down of homos or much of any care at all what they do. It's their militant behavior where they believe that everyone should be forced to approve of their behavior that's the problem. No one cares. Let them do what they want but do not push their lifestyle on everyone else. But they will not do that. They believe different and are corralling people's children into forced attendance where they are told that there is something wrong with them if they do not approve of homosexuality. That being the case people who believe differently when faced with this sort of behavior are fully within their rights to forcefully fight them back and force them away from their children. There is no halfway that they will accept so...they will end up in a fight with their tactics.
I say Putin's take on this is the appropriate one. No direct harassment or suppression as long as they do not openly and publicly advocate for homo behavior or recruitment.