There are at least two ways to answer a question about laws criminalizing deviance instead of criminalizing problems:
- it’s politically advantageous to never explicitly legislate which rights are taken away. This keeps the issue alive among your base. You never want to effectively enforce that.
- You make an in-group based on obedience to the spirit of a law; a spirit that’s risky to spell out in writing because you know it’s on the wrong side of history.
So, the status quo benefits one party; and is the best that the other party could hope to negotiate.