system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
There is a strong incentive to discriminate against gays and blacks in hiring for small businesses, and in some cases women & religious. CMV

* Fair hiring laws exist
* These laws give legal teeth to people of protected classes
* There are often equally qualified candidates that are not of protected classes
* Lawsuits of these types are often hard to defend, even when firings are justified
* It is orders of magnitude more difficult for people of protected classes to file a lawsuit successfully that they were not hired because of this reason
* It is more likely that a person of a protected class will threaten or file a lawsuit if hired and then fired, than a lawsuit is filed for not being hired. 
* Protected class members are more likely to associate their firing to their protected class
* I am unconvinced "diversity" is a tangible benefit when the liabilities are very real and measurable. 

Therefor it is logical that when a candidate of protected class presents themselves as being equally qualified to a non-protected class candidate, the logical hiring choice is to discriminate.

In small companies this is easy to get away with and certainly the smarter business move.  Since hiring liabilities have a disproportionate impact on the long term viability of a business when it is small.
gpt
In 2012, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, tasked with enforcing federal discrimination laws, charged employers with 33,512 violations based on race.

There are about 42,000,000 racial minorities in the United States.

Let's be *conservative* and say only 75% of them have jobs. 

31,500,000 minority workers, divided by 33,512 complaints, equals .00106, or .1%.

So, less one-tenth of 1% of racial minority hirings result in a discrimination charge.

Many of those charges are probably based on *valid* complaints, so the percentage of frivolous complaints is even smaller.

Based on these numbers, the statistical risk of hiring a minority employee are completely negligible unless you're looking for a reason to not hire minorities in bad faith.

Moreover, NOT hiring an employee on the basis of race, gender, etc., is a much more significant risk in itself, since it's an actionable EEOC violation.  Also, discriminatory non-hiring probably accounts for many of those 33,512 cases.