bbauska wrote:You can continue to make this about same-sex marriage, but the issue to me is whether a business has the right to turn down business.
Going back to this, I checked on the Arizona Bill.

When it was raised, the description of it describes how it was spurred by a case from New Mexico, which went to the NM Supreme Court (Elane Photography v. Willock) in which it was found that a State's 'Religious Freedom Restoration Act' as written in New Mexico (and so other states, such as Arizona), did not cover the situation. The situation being the refusal by a photographer to shoot a same-sex commitment ceremony (not a wedding, as it was not gay marriage).

Interestingly, the brief supporting the photographers by Eugene Volokh and Dale Carpenter argued that they were artists, which differentiates them from other service providers to weddings, such as caterers. I guess you could argue that a cake decorator is more artist than caterer...

Anyway, the New Mexico Supreme Court looked at a lot of the issues that came up in this thread when they found in favour of the couple:

In rejecting the plaintiff’s arguments, the New Mexico Supreme Court explained, first, that refusing to photograph a same-sex commitment ceremony because the couple has two members of the same sex is indeed discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. The plaintiff had suggested that it had made its choice on the basis of conduct—the decision of the two women to join their lives together in a public ceremony—rather than on the basis of status. Had one of the women sought a self-portrait, for example, the plaintiff explained that it would have been happy to take that portrait or any other kind of photograph that did not directly support the choice of the couple to join in the equivalent of a marriage relationship.

The high court refuted the distinction presented by the plaintiff and argued persuasively that discriminating against a couple’s commitment ceremony by virtue of its same-sex character is the essence of sexual-orientation discrimination, particularly given that the plaintiff here is a wedding photographer.

The court next rejected the plaintiff’s arguments under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the first of which was a free speech claim. The plaintiff argued that because photography is an inherently expressive activity, the law’s forcing the plaintiff to tell a photographic story about a same-sex ceremony constituted compelled speech, in violation of the First Amendment. Like forcing a child to utter the pledge of allegiance or forcing a driver to sport a vanity plate that reads “Live Free or Die,” the plaintiff asserted that compelling the narrative that wedding photography necessarily entails amounts to the law forcing the plaintiff to say positive things about same-sex relationships, contrary to its actual views of such relationships.

The court responded that the law does nothing to single out expressive activity. The plaintiff chose to run a photography business as a public accommodation. Rather than compelling a pro-same-sex-couples narrative, then, the law simply demanded that the public accommodation extend its services—the same services that it chose to provide to the public for money—to everyone, without regard to sexual orientation. That is no more “forced speech” than it would be if the plaintiff’s business was selling coffee, and it was required to sell coffee to everyone, regardless of sexual orientation.

Furthermore, the court explained, it would be exceedingly unlikely that anyone seeing the plaintiff’s photographs of the defendant’s commitment ceremony would interpret those photographs as communicating the photographer’s endorsement of same-sex unions.

Finally, the plaintiff made a religious argument, invoking both the First Amendment and state law, and suggesting that the photographer’s religion prohibits her from supporting a same-sex union by performing photography services celebrating such a union. The court rejected the First Amendment religious argument, on the ground that the First Amendment Free Exercise Clause simply requires the evenhanded application of neutral laws, rather than any affirmative accommodation of religious injunctions. Even if providing photographs of the defendant’s ceremony would violate the religious obligations of the plaintiff, in other words, the plaintiff would not be entitled to an exemption from a neutral law of general application, which the New Mexico Human Rights Act prohibition against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is.

(my bolding) The New Mexico Supreme Court Applies Anti-Discrimination Law to Wedding Photographer Refusing to Photograph Same-Sex Commitment Ceremonies