>Quibble tho: the actually-existing Federation in the media as it
>evolved away from Roddenberry is actually rather politically
>retrograde. It practices an immensely strong form of federalism that
>does very little to protect the rights and dignity of its citizens as
>regards to the local politics of their specific species or homeworlds.
>Member worlds are permitted to do things like exile people forever
>because they disapprove of their private consensual romantic choices
>or to forcibly remove children from their parents in order to raise
>them in single-gender enclaves, and Federation law supports that and
>will even in some cases enforce it on their behalf.

This was in part due to the corruption of the Prime Directive from its TOS days as a simple policy of not giving the mundanes any hint that there was intelligent life beyond their planet and became an effective ban on the Federation and Starfleet "interfering" in the affairs of any member planet. But not only was this a bad policy, it was also one that was inconsistently enforced. At least two worlds the Federation had dealings with allowed the repression of an entire gender, but when Bajor temporarily reinstated a caste system, the Federation rejected its application for membership.