You raise very valid concerns. You are absolutely right that allowing employers free reign over their businesses would result in discriminatory practices. However, I do not believe that in this day and age a business can prosper while alienating potential customers/employees. You brought up the "gay cake" example, and you are right that several people came to the defense of the bakers, but from what I witnessed, the vast majority of the country were disgusted with their actions. In that specific case, the central government got involved and the bakers had to pay a hefty fine, but I think the better way to handle businesses like those is to boycott them. Large-scale boycotts are much easier to coordinate nowadays because of social media. If even a third of those baker's usual customers stopped shopping there, their business would suffer greatly. They may even go out of business. In theory, that's how the free market is supposed to work. The consumers decide where they want their money to go, and the bad businesses die out naturally. This is not always the case, true. Especially in the American South, there are surely plenty of areas in which a racist business owner could be successful, but those would only be in areas with an extremely small black population, so the negative effects are negligible. Areas with a large black population would have the most negative effects. However, these would also be the areas in which an organized boycott would be most effective because of all the blacks in the area. And with all that said, if I were black, I wouldn't want to work for a racist employer who only hired me because they had to. I'd rather get that job denied to me and find myself an employer who doesn't hate me. So to answer your question, I think yes, employer's rights is worth the negative effects because the negatives are mostly negligible, and because it would result in discriminatory employers to be ultimately run out of business. Hopefully that all made sense. I appreciate your response because it made me think about another angle of this issue that I had not considered that closely. I'd love to hear your thoughts on my answer. Did it satisfy you? Why or why not? Perhaps there's something I'm missing? That is certainly not outside the realm of possibilities.

What, the part about the government making it illegal?