I think you are overestimating the ease with which “specially items” can be delineated from “mass-produced items”. There’s a whole continuum in-between.
For instance, can the baker refuse to sell a wedding cake, but not refuse to sell a “thinking of how much I love you” cake? What about birthday cakes? Anniversary cakes? House warming cakes?
For that matter, the cake toppers need not necessarily be recognizable as male and female. The last wedding I went to, the toppers were little statues of a turtle and an elephant, because the couple thought that those animals were a good metaphorical representation of them.
Meanwhile, some folks have stated that the free market would never eliminate discrimination. That’s not strictly true. The problem with the free market isn’t that it doesn’t work; the problem with it is that it works really, really slowly. If we had relied on the free market to end discrimination against blacks, it would have worked eventually… but it would have taken centuries.
Not sure what your point is, unless you’re auditioning for the latest Batman supervillain franchise by plotting The Perfect Crime.
Yes, yes, illegal bigots can get away with being illegal bigots a lot of the time, just like drug dealers and prostitutes and insider traders can get away their shenanigans a lot of the time. Yes, there are ways to make detection harder.
But do you really think that your scheme is somehow perfect and uncrackable? Do you even think that’s relevant if it is?
So what? Purveyors of high-end foodstuffs are allowed to discriminate, but not cheapie restaurants?
So if a gay couple decided to have a burger party at the local Burger King to celebrate their engagement, because that’s where they met, the owner of the Burger King can’t object, even if it goes against his deeply held religious beliefs?
I’ll have my Double Cheez Burger with Rainbow Sauce, and a side order of bronies, please. 
Barry Goldwater, arch-conservative and regarded as one of the fathers of modern conservativism, was apparently also strongly a man of his principles, which can’t be said of a lot of other politicians. By that same libertarian streak in him, he also favored abortion rights (not just with words, but with his votes in Congress) and, later, became rather outspoken in favor of gay rights.
He clearly didn’t feel favorably towards abortion or gayness (as far as I’ve ever been able to tell), but he stuck with his libertarian ideology to the end. He opposed the Christian Right’s more oppressive political/social agendas, which he felt were highly UN-Libertarian, and allegedly remarked that all good Christians should kick Jerry Falwell’s ass.
Cite: I sort of knew this all along, but just skimmed the Wikipedia page on Barry Goldwater, which briefly covers these points.
ETA: He certainly didn’t like Federal laws restricting individual rights. I don’t really know where he stood on States Rights vs. Individual Rights.
On what basis are you saying this? As far as I’m aware, you couldn’t depend on the free market because discrimination was baked(the pun really was unintentional) into American laws. It’s funny so many people here are railing against the free market, whereas the most pernicious and longest lasting forms of discrimination are actually driven by government. Why is it that supposed free market shortcomings in the counterfactual inspire distrust, but actual government misdeeds are given a pass?
Actually, on abortion, Goldwater was a typical politician. He got his daughter an illegal abortion in 1955, he took a pro-life postion all through the 1970s, then during the Reagan Administration, he turned on the Religious Right when they opposed Sandra Day O’Connor. He talked a good game at one time but let’s not pretend the elderly Goldwater was the same as Mr. Conservative. “Put not your trust in princes”, indeed.
As far as gay rights & the issue of the OP, one can believe gays can have all the rights in the world to marry, adopt, and live life without harrassment, and can also believe that people should not be legally compelled to do work which endorses homosexuality.
Oy, bronies aren’t gay to a higher degree than the rest of the population. We’re just really into ponies. 
@Friar: How is serving a homosexual couple the way you would any other couple “endorsing” homosexuality? Unless you’re a prostitute?
What makes you think that? You couldn’t and can’t rely on the free market because in a free market full of bigots, it’ll favor bigotry. And because people motivated by bigotry (or all sort of other agendas for that matter) are perfectly willing to ignore market pressure to keep indulging it.
And the free market has never been particularly driven towards social justice anyway; relying on it to promote better treatment for gays makes about as much sense as relying on chess to do so. There’s just no connection between the two.
Actually just making a wedding cake is arguable, unless they have to write a message on it, then it is coercive speech. However, oher cases such photographing a wedding, host a receptioning & such do demand a more active degree of participation.
BUT there are ways that a coerced party could make a statement while doing a legally-demanded job & to the best degree possible.
Because you did, and do, have discrimination in your laws? Jim Crow laws, laws not allowing women to vote, laws not allowing gay people to get married. Laws are far more pernicious than the free market that you seem to so despise, because laws give you NO option. The government has negatively affected each and every single black person, woman and gay person in the United States. Whereas left to the market, you simply have to find a baker who is either not a bigot or will not let bigotry cost him a sale.
So a law that says that women have the right to vote is just as bad as a law that says that women do not have the right to vote?
And we’ve had laws forbidding discrimination. Whereas the magic free market has done little if anything against discrimination. Discrimination has always primarily been fought by force and coercion; it stops when some authority makes it stop, and not before.
What makes you think there will be any, except when the law forces them? What makes you think that it won’t be going against bigotry that costs them sales? What makes you think that they won’t make more money catering to the bigots?
Really, your entire theory rests on the baseless assumption that profit follows virtue.
I will validate the concerns some have shown here regarding the cake decision in Colorado. I am suspicious of big government as I was raised to be self reliant to enjoy being free and independent. The cake decision overrules the individual decision not to serve a cake for religious reasons using civil liberties as an excuse.
While I find that confusing, I do know one thing for sure:
The illegitimate establishment that would have us all unarmed in public so they can more easily enjoy their double standard of liberty and privacy wants the rest of us to turn ourselves in and sign up for obamacare.
Our history is littered with abuses of power by our government, and the commerce clause in the Constitution has been adulterated into one of the many onerous agencies bureaucrats use for their vehicles of tyranny and corruption.
“The true theory of our Constitution is surely the wisest and best, that the States are independent as to everything within themselves, and united as to everything respecting foreign affairs. Let the General Government be reduced to foreign concerns only, and let our affairs be disentangled from those of all other nations, except as to commerce, which the merchants will manage the better, the more they are left free to manage for themselves, and our General Government may be reduced to a very simple organization, and a very inexpensive one; a few plain duties to be performed by a few servants.”
— Thomas Jefferson
Colorado is one of fifty sovereign States granting only limited powers to a central government to represent us in unity on the world stage. The rest of it needs to go. Starting with the 16th amendment that was never fully ratified. We’ve got much bigger fish to fry than just baking a cake.
End the Fed.
No one is independent. And you are free because of big government, not in spite of it. It takes a big government to prevent abuses and corruption and exploitation; it only takes a tiny government to be oppressive.
:dubious:
No; the states are subordinate to the Federal government, they aren’t sovereign. And “states rights” is just an excuse to prey upon and abuse people and always has been. No one really believes in them; they just scream “state’s rights” when the federal government is restraining them from hurting someone, but if the same people can use the federal government to hurt people they don’t hesitate to override states on the matter.
There is one distinction that is worth pointing out (although, it’s not going to matter to most people on here). The bake didn’t want to refuse service to gay customers on account of their sexual orientation. So it is analogous to refusing to bake a cake for a mixed-race marriage, but it’s not analogous to refusing to serve a black person.
Now, you may be right that blacks and homosexuals have suffered a similar discrimination when it comes to segregation and service in public accommodations, but the baker’s argument isn’t that he won’t serve gays, it’s that he won’t serve gay weddings. Now, I’m not sure I expect many people to appreciate the distinction, but it is a distinction.
I question any sort of “free market solution” when we currently have businesses that donate to groups that spend money to try to murder gay people, and have an entire political party leaping to defend them for doing so. They’re not out of business, and don’t seem to have changed at all. How, exactly, has the free market fixed that, or should we just shrug at the idea of that sort of oppression and go “Well, people voted with their dollars!” ?
Well that sounds like its probably a crime. What are you talking about?
The law being pushed in Uganda that demands death for homosexuals perhaps? That’s heavily supported and funded by US evangelicals.