LGBT folks, stop settling for the lesser evil

From the Washington Blade, we have a story about how tortured the federal legislative process is. Faced with a bad bill from the Republicans that created double-jeopardy for "sexual offenders" (which some of us were considered until the 2003 Lawrence decision), the Democrats decided to try to make it less bad (in their view) by tacking on gay-inclusive "hate crimes" legislation. Predictably, this strategy failed, and now the bad bill is going forward without the "gay-friendly" rider.

Why can't we just get the federal government out of micro-managing crimes that states can handle perfectly well on their own? Congress and the President should only be dealing with those things that the states themselves cannot handle (such as national defense and interstate commerce) and leave the rest to the states, as required by the Tenth Amendment.

The one thing that both gay-bashing and the sexual abuse of a child have in common is that both are crimes that can easily be handled by the states, without Ted Kennedy and Bill Frist sticking their noses into it.