In a free country, people would be free to do business with whomever they wished. In a free country.
What you said.
The whole idea that no-one (business) can “discriminate” is absurd.
Insurance discriminates - single young males pay more than elder married males, etc. No-one has yet proposed a law.
Some small businesses can discriminate against a guy who doesn’t wear a shirt. No laws to keep that from happening?
Yet we can’t behave in business as we would in “real life” where we’re supposed to have freedom of association. If we don’t want to serve certain people, so be it. Tough luck. And it’s easier to see what the values of those people are, too, as a customer.
We lost this battle when the federal government decided, and the courts agreed, that it was government’s power to force white people to provide services to black people.
So many conservatives, rightly repulsed by the notion that a person should be treated differently because of the color of their skin, confused that notion of what was right, with the idea that we needed to force people to be better.
Don’t get me wrong, you can’t go back. We wouldn’t really need those laws anymore, because a vast majority of businesses would not discriminate, and those that would, well people would learn where not to shop (white people know where they can’t travel or walk, and we don’t generally sue over it).
But we never should have legislated tolerance.