I have read them and I do not agree that they are irrelevant. Neither is Barnette, or Wooley, or Pruneyard Shopping Center. The law review article I cited also mentions most or all of these. This comment by the Court in Dale goes right to the heart of the problem with overly broad state public accommodations laws:
State public accommodations laws were originally enacted to prevent discrimination in traditional places of public accommodation -- like inns and trains....In this case, the New Jersey Supreme Court went a step further and applied its public accommodations law to a private entity without even attempting to tie the term "place" to a physical location. As the definition of "public accommodation" has expanded from clearly commercial entities, such as restaurants, bars, and hotels, to membership organizations such as the Boy Scouts, the potential for conflict between state public accommodations laws and the First Amendment rights of organizations has increased.
In her concurring opinion in the Jaycees case, Justice O'Connor distinguished between commercial associations, which enjoy only minimal First Amendment protection, and expressive associations, which are much more strongly protected. But she did not provide any standard by which to determine which category a particular association falls into. That is the problem. When so many kinds of things are made public accommodations by state laws, there is no way to know if any particular one is mainly an expressive association, or a commercial one. That is what I was getting at in the hypotheticals about architects and photographers--some enterprises and organizations have some features of a commercial business, but also heavily involve the expression or celebration of ideas of some type.
More than one First Amendment freedom is implicated by these state public accommodations laws, and they overlap somewhat. There is this question of the freedom of association. There is also a question of the freedom of speech, which involves both expressive speech and the freedom from being compelled by law to express views you do not agree with. The smaller the group, club, "business," etc. that a state law defines as a public accommodation, and the more expressive and less commercial its activities, the more likely that law is to run afoul of the First Amendment.
Another constitutional right, the implied right to personal privacy, may also be implicated by these laws. The Court in the Jaycees case identified the fourteenth amendment's due process clause--where the Court in some cases (including Roe v. Wade) has seemed to locate this privacy right--as another source of associational freedom. This right was also mentioned briefly in the concurring opinion in Prune Yard Shopping Center as a possible basis for a shopkeeper to object to his property being used to promote messages he did not agree with.
It's not clear to me how a state RFRA (which involves still another First Amendment right, the right to free exercise of religion) would interact with public accommodations laws. The Court discussed its free exercise decisions involving shops--one a kosher butcher, as I recall--in the Hobby Lobby decision.
