With the bakery thing I am wondering should people have the right to refuse to serve others ( in business) based on the owner's stands on the customers' lifestyle choices?
I remember the concept of the words "Management reserves the right to refuse service to anyone".
My view is that a business should be allowed to serve, or not serve, anyone it chooses. The only requirement I would impose is that if the business is based in a public premises (e.g. a retail store) they should make it very clear before entering who, if anyone, they will refuse to serve. So whether their rule is "Drunk people will not be served" or "no blacks, no gays, no Jews", it must be clear to anyone that they won't be served before they enter.
It would also need to be based on the management's decisions rather than the preferences of individual employees. It's clearly not workable to find that you go into a retail store only to find that the cashier on till 8 won't serve black people, the one at 9 doesn't like people who smell bad and the one at 6 won't serve men.
I do believe that anyone in a public position (police, councils, court houses etc) should be required to serve anyone regardless.
All that said I do struggle to understand why people have issues with serving people based on their lifestyle. The high profile cases always seem to relate to people providing wedding services not wanting to serve gay couples, but it's not as if making a cake or taking photographs represents a moral endorsement of a lifestyle and I have to wonder whether the people turning away the gay couple would ask prying questions of a heterosexual couple to make sure they weren't adulterers, fornicators etc.
