This is a decision made by an employer of a private business, and as such they have the right to allow whatever exceptions they want. If this was going to come up, I'm glad it was dealt with personally rather than governmentally.
But as others have brought up, there's a really bad precedent for this. People being refused service for all kinds of reasons. What if she's the only person working the register? Are you just supposed to go home, or drive however many miles to go somewhere else, even though the store sells pork/alcohol which you are supposed to be allowed to purchase?
How many people missed their flights and flushed a few hundred dollars down the drain because Muslim taxi drivers refused to transport their luggage if it contained alcohol?
How many girls had preventable unwanted pregnancies because they were denied access to emergency contraception by Christian pharm techs?
When you do a job, you are not representing yourself. You are representing the company you work for. If you cannot in good conscious do that, you should not work there.
It's all good and well to be tolerant towards employees with different lifestyles and beliefs. But what about being tolerant towards CUSTOMERS with different lifestyles and beliefs?
The customer can't help who happens to be the only person working the register, or the taxi driver they happened to run into, or the pharm tech they happened to run into. Why is it ok to discriminate against the customer, and deny them possibly vital service?
Why are they offering a service that the customer can be denied access to at the whimsy of an employee?
What's really ironic about this is that I'm on another thread about tattoos, and people are arguing that if you're going to display your personal beliefs with a tattoo, you should expect to be turned down for jobs.
Yet if you express your personal beliefs by denying your customers services that you are supposed to offer, you should expect special treatment?
I don't get this.