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While religion is a protected class, political orientation is not protected. It is perfectly legal (and moral) to ask someone if they are conservative before agreeing to do work for them.

You can even cite a policy to really drive it home: "I do not conduct business with racists, bigots, misogynists, homophobes, xenophobes, fascists or any other type of conservatives."

Cool but where do you draw the line? If a taxi driver refuses to drive you is it still fine? What if a teacher refuses to teach your children? Or if a doctor refuses to treat you?

And how do you differentiate between this and say, a shop, or a doctor? Do LGBT people not "have the right to the labour" of those services?

I disagree with that framing entirely. But I'm curious to know how you would differentiate.

Whether you see it or not, your opinion is carving out a way for legal bigotry when done by a christian. Of course an atheist refusing to serve this asshole bigot would open up the door for a religious discrimination case against the atheist because bigots want nothing more than to divide society. We have no obligation to defend a bigot's rights they are actively taking those same rights away from others.

No. He gets to choose who to work for. He doesn't get to choose not to work for entire classes of people when those classes are protected.

It's the same as if he said he didn't want black clients.

Selective religion to suit their needs. Oldest trick in the literal book.

Jesus was white BTW

/s in case it wasn't abundantly clear

As someone who grew up in a very religious household, I can tell you without a doubt in my mind, the worst people I ever met were the church crowd. Everyone was so nice to each other inside the building but as soon as the service was over, people showed their real colors in the parking lot.

You'd get parents screaming at their kids for "misbehaving" during the boring ass sermon, cars bolting out of their parking spaces with no disregard for other people walking, cars battling each other to try and get out of the lot before the other guy.. You know.. Cause football was starting soon.

I feel like framing the issue like this kinda dangerous. If a single entity (in this case, a business) is allowed to discriminate against a protected class, then are all businesses that provide that service allowed to discriminate against said class?

It seems as though they would be. That gets us back to a version of the Jim Crow South pretty quickly. How are LGBTQ+ folks supposed to exist as equal members in a society if entire segments of that society are legally allowed to close themselves off? What happens when a business that controls major segments of more important service sectors makes a similar decision (for example, say the only Level 1 trauma center in a city is in a privately-owned, religiously-affiliated medical center that now has a legal precedent to say they won't serve LGBTQ+ patients for religious reasons)?

Same reason black people wanted to eat at the whites only lunch counters.

In 303 Creative v. Elenis the answer is: the couple was manufactured. No LGBT+ couple tried to hire them. The man named in court docs who supposedly tried to hire 303 Creative first heard about the case when reporters contacted him shortly before the Supreme Court released their decision. He has been happily married (to a woman) for a long time, and had no need for a wedding website.

"I don't want to treat black people or LGBTQ like human beings." -- like that? Or how about signs on businesses "No Gays" or "No Hispanics". Does this apply to government entities and their employees? How about it enough people don't want to drink out of the same public fountain as black people, should we then bring back segregated fountains since everyone has a right to drink from fountains?

Sorry, but showing bigotry cannot be accepted by a tolerant society because it breaks the one tenet of such a society: be tolerant.

The thing you're ignoring is that being rejected by businesses is harmful to those being rejected. And moreover public businesses discriminating is a great way to fracture society and uphold a culture of bigotry and discrimination that then bleeds into every other area. If your religion teaches you to be a bigoted asshole then you need a different religion.

If you run a business, you don't have a right to discriminate against whole groups of people.