You can generally keep serving every customer while declining to produce a specific custom message that contradicts your faith, and that distinction is usually where these cases are won or lost. Ask for the complaint and the exact ordinance section in writing, put your own service policy in writing, and answer on paper and on time. Do not sign a settlement, consent order, or training agreement before you have counsel who knows your state.
What is actually happening
A complaint has been filed, or threatened, and the first move is almost always an informal conversation where you are invited to explain yourself. What they need is a quotable sentence that sounds like you turn people away because of who they are, rather than that you decline a particular custom job. If that sentence never comes, the next thing they want is a quiet conciliation agreement with your name at the bottom, because a signature settles the matter without anyone testing whether the ordinance actually reaches you. Silence works too. A missed deadline can be entered as agreement.
Turning the city's own civil rights language into a mandate · Rule 4. The ordinance was written with broad words like equal access and public accommodation, and the pressure comes from holding you to the city's stated commitment while quietly redefining what the words cover. This tactic only bites where there is a real gap between what you say and what you do. Close that gap first and the lever has nothing to pull on.
What Scripture says
“But Paul said unto them, They have beaten us openly uncondemned, being Romans, and have cast us into prison; and now do they thrust us out privily? nay verily; but let them come themselves and fetch us out.” Acts 16:37
What the book says · Chapter 23, The Mountain of Business & Economics: Christian Stewardship and Economic Influence
“In the biblical worldview, economic justice requires impartiality. A transaction should be judged by the value of the goods rather than by the identity or politics of the participants. Cutting off banking access to a ministry, or firing an employee over his religious views, violates the principle of honest scales. It introduces a false weight, which is ideology, into an economic exchange. Christian business ethics demands a return to merit and objective value.”
From Rules for Radical Christians, quoted exactly.
What the law generally says
Many cities and counties have nondiscrimination ordinances that reach public accommodations, employment, and housing, and they generally run through a local commission or human relations office that takes complaints, investigates, and offers conciliation before any hearing. Federal constitutional protections generally limit the government's power to compel a person to create expressive work, such as custom design, writing, photography, or speech, even where the sale of ordinary goods to all customers can be required. A number of states have religious freedom statutes that require the government to show a strong justification before burdening sincere religious practice, and some states limit or preempt what local governments may do in this area. Ordinances often contain their own exemptions, commonly for religious organizations, sometimes for very small employers, and the definitions section frequently matters more than the headline. Which of these applies to you turns on your state, your city, and the wording of the ordinance itself, and that is what Ask looks up.
The words to use
"I serve every person who comes through my door, and I intend to keep doing that. What I cannot do is design or produce a message that contradicts my faith. Will you please tell me in writing which section of the ordinance you believe declining a specific custom request violates?"
Your move
- Ask in writing for the complaint, the ordinance section cited, the investigation procedure, every deadline, and the appeal path. Accept nothing important by phone alone.
- Write your own service policy today, one page: you sell to all persons, you decline certain custom messages regardless of who requests them. Date it, sign it, keep it.
- Pull your records of customers served and orders filled so the actual pattern of your business is on paper before anyone characterizes it for you.
- Answer in writing before the deadline, calm and short, using the sentences above. Do not argue theology at the counter or on the phone.
- Contact a religious liberty legal organization in your state before any hearing, mediation, or settlement signature, and go sit in on a city council public comment session while you are at it.
- Document every contact: date, name, title, what was said, what was asked of you. Notes written the same day are worth far more than notes written later.
- Ask for the ordinance's exemption language and the complaint procedure in writing, and ask whether any prior complaints were resolved by conciliation.
- Do not sign a conciliation agreement, consent order, or mandatory training commitment before counsel reads it. That signature is the precedent they are fishing for.
Your situation, your state
This page is the general answer. Describe what is actually happening to you and Ask returns the answer for your situation and your state, with the law looked up and the exact words to use. Your first ask is free.
Ask about your situationNot legal advice. When it stops being a conversation, a lawyer licensed in your state is the next call.