Wildlight and markadams99, ALL physicians are government regulated, and have been for a very long time.
There's also the matter of professional pride. You don't like your patient of the moment? Suck it up, put on a professional manner, treat the patient, move on. The quality of your work should not depend on your personal feelings about a patient.
Refusal of service to customers is hardly a new matter. Some pharmacists refuse to fill any birth control pill prescriptions, and in many red states, they are protected by law even if no other pharmacist is available to serve the patient. The pharmacist's claim is generally "birth control pills cause abortion", which not only is factually INCORRECT, but widely known to be so in the medical and pharmacist professions.
Let the thread now explode.
Hey, at least it is a change from the endless DRone debates
Seriously, I do learn something from some of the DR posts.
I live in a big city (well, biggish) and I could deal just fine with getting turned away by a baker or florist or photographer because there are lots of them around, and because I am a well-to-do white woman who doesn't get the same sort of crap that my black counterparts get on a regular basis - a rare encounter with an *sshole over a non-essential service is not a huge stressor. As I explained in a post about Ferguson a few pages ago, we the people don't need any additional religious excuses to behave badly. Yep, there are plenty of people in MO that would claim religious objection to serving blacks. I would like to kick the camel's nose back out of the tent, and keep the legal principle of non-discrimination in public accommodations (including businesses) intact.