Really? You think that the chance of toddler tantrums by straight white people mean that non-white, non-straight people should not have the protection of the law against discrimination? That's your argument? Nothing to do with principle? Nothing to do with what's right? Just: the straight white people are going to unlawfully resist democratic laws enacted to protect historically and currrently oppressed people so lets not bother enacting those laws?
If you break that one down by racial divides you don't have the coalition you think you do.
https://sociology.yale.edu/sites/default/files/race_and_marriage_equality.pdfBut go ahead and blame it all on whitey.
On another note, when I read his argument, I figured someone would zero in on that regrettable piece of rhetoric. You can strike it from his point entirely and respond to that, which is what I believe is closer to his intended articulation, or keep going with your assumption that he's a white racist, up to you.
More moderate libertarian types, like myself, or the guys at Marginal Revolution, or probably the guys at EconLog, can absolutely be horrified that blacks were treated as second-class citizens, and think this should be prevented even if those kinda fucks up parts of the Constitution. Blacks are a huge chunk of the population across a huge geographic area, and their treatment was really, really bad. Homosexuals in America are a substantially smaller portion and don't face anything like the discrimination blacks faced, outside of certain communities, and the inability to get a wedding cake is pretty small potatoes.
I didn't read that inclusion of the numbers as central to his argument, rather put there for emphasis. As in, if we're going to enact sweeping federal legislation with broad powers and murderously harsh penalties it should be because there's an actual problem that calls for it and has no other resolution in sight. Gay rights and the situation in general for homosexuals has been improving steadily in the U.S., and now, as then, the real successes have been not in adding legislation establishing the protected class, but stripping the legislation that enshrined certain biases and excluded, either explicitly or accidentally, homosexuals and homosexual couples.
The civil rights era in U.S. History, which many of you in this thread have gotten completely wrong, was an era where these forms of discrimination were explicitly legal and in some cases required. The government was building facilities with separate drinking fountains. It was the law itself that was the problem. That's a fundamental difference to the baker case, where the problem is an individual asshole.
And so we have this legislation on our books that has a historical context, and the goal as a country should be to move towards a world where it isn't necessary. I don't think we're there yet but we're getting closer.
Someone mentioned a swastika cake, and that is an interesting example. In Germany you couldn't create a Swastika cake. They have specific laws about shit like that because it was a problem for them, and their national shame calls on all of them to accept a restriction on their right of free expression. We don't have a similar prohibition because, quite frankly, it's helpful when people raise that flag so you know they don't matter and can be safely ignored (or in the case of liberals, claim they're valid representations of the right and attempt to conflate the two).
So too in this country, our legacy of racial relations calls upon many of us to accept restrictions on our rights to discriminate, because we took it too far for too long, and refused to change by any other means.
There's a constitutional basis for the enforcement of things in the civil rights act as well, it's the 14th amendment, which is specific:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
And so a law that says same-sex marriage or relations between same-sex couples at the state level is unconstitional, and we see those victories happening again and again:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_v._TexasBut a law that provides special protections to same-sex couples...that isn't as clear cut.