The thing is most people will have no choice to act on such extremes of liberty anyway. So maybe the person that owns the bakery decides not to bake cakes for gays and if that's the dominant belief system where they live they can get away with it. But does the person working at a bakery that DOES bake cakes for gays, have a choice to refuse to work on this particular cake as it's for gays? Not if they wish to keep their job! So even the dubious "liberty not to bake cakes for gays" is in actual practice very limited (limited to those that have the wealth and dominant position in society to practice it). Should the employee have a right to sue the company: "they fired me for refusing to work on cakes for gays" and if so how far are those protections for an employees "freedom of conscience" going to apply? Because surely any protection that applies to employers should apply to employees, that's merely fairness, both have just as much right to their consciences. Maybe everyone should be able to sue companies if they require one to work weekends, because it may be against one's religion not to keep the sabbath. Hey, I'm beginning to like this law! ;) Imagine a world where employees could sue employers for being terminated for anything that violated their conscience (and assuming they didn't abuse it even). But to argue instead that everyone should own a cake bakery is all rather, uh speaking of cake, Marie Antoinette at that point (she may or may not have actually said it, but that isn't relevant to this conversation).
Alternately, the restaurant decides not to serve black people, but what if you hate segregation and believe it is immoral (and I would hope most everyone does now, but bear with this hypothetical) do you have a choice not to be a waiter at a restaurant that refuses to serve black people? It depends. Are almost all restaurants like this? They certainly were at one time in certain places, so you may not have had much choice. Are jobs scarce? Well then so much for liberty!!! Hahaha. Work at the evil place refusing to serve people based on the color of their skin!
I don't have much use of a liberty that only in practice applies to business owners who happen to be in the majority, but not their employees when push comes to shove, and not to minorities in the society whom it will be used to discriminate against.
I don't actually favor banning any religion (that's quite apart and a separate matter from whether businesses can get religion) but if a religions main thing is to discriminate against gays I can certainly denounce such religious beliefs. Like one would denounce religious beliefs whose main result were (admittedly racist) cartoonists getting shot, right? (not all of Islam btw).
Religion took a bad turn in the U.S.. Religious leaders did back much of the civil rights movement etc. - mainline protestantism. Sure their was often Jewish support, not sure about Catholicism etc. - but leaving minority religions in this country aside for a moment. But mainline protestantism has declined in the U.S. (I have no idea if those people became fundamentalists, or agnostics, or non practicing christians or what) and fundamentalism etc. are much more dominant.
