Should wedding photographers be able to turn down gay weddings

By now you have probably all heard the uproar over the "Religious Freedom Restoration Act" in Indiana. This law was put in place to protect religious people's beliefs in the workplace but has had tremendous backlash as an "anti gay" law. From the oppositions point of view, this law would give businesses the opportunity to refuse service to gay people. This outcry has started to produce new laws that make it illegal to refuse service based on race or sexual orientation.

As a professional wedding photographer who has yet to shoot a gay wedding, I have an interesting take on these new laws. I personally have no problem with gay marriage and I will probably shoot the first gay wedding that comes my way but I still would like to be able to refuse service to potential gay clients without being sued for a hate crime. I refuse to shoot weddings for people all the time and I am against laws that limit my power to make decisions for my own business.

I've shot weddings professionally for 10 years now. At the start of my career I took on every job I could simply because I needed the money to survive. As time went on, I started booking more weddings and I was able to raise my prices. Recently I've been able to get a bit more picky about what jobs I would take and which I would refuse.

In the past 5 years I've refused to work with clients because:
They seem high maintenance
They are indecisive
They call me too much
They ask too many questions
They try to change my style
They don't seem trust worthy
They aren't buying a big enough package
Their wedding is outside during the summer
Their wedding is in the winter when I may want to take a vacation
Their wedding takes place at a Venue I don't like
Their wedding location is too far away
Their wedding is too far in the future

Some of the reasons above may sound reasonable to you and some may sound totally ridiculous, and I understand that, but that is the beauty of owning your own business right?

Now you may say that the reasons above are understandable but it would be unacceptable to refuse service because of someones race or sexuality. I understand that argument but I would like to play devils advocate here. Let's start with race.

Yes, it sounds terrible to refuse to shoot someones wedding because of their race but there may be a bit more going on than skin tone. In many cases, different races have different cultures and different wedding traditions. I personally have never shot a traditional Indian wedding. For these weddings photographers are required to shoot up to 14 hours/day for 3 or 4 days in a row. I've been approached by a few Indian couples but once they hear that I haven't shot an "Indian wedding" before, they look elsewhere. At this point, I am not experienced with that type of wedding. I wouldn't do as good of a job as someone who worked exclusively with Indian weddings. If I decided to turn down an Indian wedding it doesn't make me a racist any more than the Indian couples who refused to hire me because of my lack of experience.

I've spoken frankly with a lot of wedding photographers about gay weddings. One of our biggest fears has to do with posing. Most of our clients are not professional models and it is up to us to put them in flattering poses for the portraits. All wedding photographers have a go-to list of poses that they use at every single wedding. There are very specific things that we do with our brides to make them look feminine and beautiful and very specific things we do with our grooms to make them look handsome. Posing a gay couple isn't so cut and dry. One of my close friends just booked his first gay wedding and he paid to fly to Las Vegas just to take a class on "photographing gay weddings." He thought that he was going to learn about posing but he told me that he learned how very different a gay wedding can be. When there are 2 brides, who is going to walk down the aisle? Sometimes both brides will wear a wedding dress, sometimes one will wear a suite. Should their attire determine the way that you photograph and pose them?

Obviously this is something that anyone would learn over time but being that I haven't shot a single gay couple before, it's something that I'm not going to be an expert with the first few times I try. This may not seem like it's a big enough issue to completely refuse to shoot a wedding but I would argue that it's far more serious of an issue than many of the excuses I've used to reject weddings in my list above. If I don't feel comfortable with a potential client or the event, I'm not going to accept the wedding, it's not any deeper than that.

All this being said, I don't want to live in a world where people aren't allowed inside a store or at a restaurant because of they way they look or who they love. So does this make me a hypocrite? Why does refusing someone service at a restaurant feel so offensive to me but refusing to shoot a wedding feel so normal? I'd love to hear your thoughts on this issue.