I am seriously asking, does opening a business come with those rules? Is there a mandate that says a business owner must serve a customer? I don't believe a business should survive if it has any sort of discriminative practices, but that seems like a decision that should be left up to the operator.

Doesn't the free market allow a business owner to alienate themselves from a specific demographic of clientele? The owner of Chic-fil-a donated money to anti-gay groups, granted he had enough capital to weather a storm of pro-gay boycott, but his actions were more proactively anti-gay than this couple.

I understand they did some shitty things after the fact, but they didn't seek out a gay couple to not make a cake for. For me this just falls into "slippery slope" precedent for consumers against business owners...unless there's is some sort of statute that i am admittedly ignorant of.