Assault On Free Speech

[A Theist]

I lived in a Urban inner city neighborhood for the most of my lifetime. There were a lot of gay bookstores and gay businesses which pandered to the gay lifestyle that moved in to our area over the course of some years. They weren't breaking any city ordinances as far as I could see and there wasn't an effort by our mayor and other elected office holders to ban gay businesses from our city like Chicago and Boston tried to do Chick-fil-A.
Do you think the mayors of Boston and Chicago severely violated the trust of their office when they tried to deny a businessowner his rights because of political and religious differences? Doesn't their conduct also qualify as severely unethical?

Did any of them ever release statements that amounted to "We promote the gay lifestyle. We believe those who do not follow this lifestyle to be immoral."
That would be unethical but I think you'd struggle to find even one statement such as that. Until you do I don't think you can draw any serious comparison.

Perhaps, I think if they seriously consider this business to be harmful to the welfare and happiness of their cities then they would be remiss not to attempt to block it. The reason they attempted to block the business is because Chick-fil-a attempted to combine religion, politics, intolerance and business together to gain further influence over a population that neither wanted nor asked for it.
Every other successful business has understood they must remain religiously and politically neutral. Chick-fil-a has broken this commitment.
I am not entirely sure as to the legality of such a move, I don't think you are either.

Ultimately I think all of this is a moot point. Its the market who will decide and I think the majority of the market will not tolerate the brazen audacity it takes to attempt to jam views down a customers throat. I think they will look at McDonalds, Burger King, Pizza Hut and the other fast food joints who have clearly understood it is not their place to enforce any kind of agenda upon the public. Chick-fil-a have cost themselves a large source of revenue through this misguided move and I think it will present them with great difficulties when attempting to keep up with competitors.

Like you said, it'll be left to the people to decide what they'll tolerate. If anyone's offended that Mr. Cathy voiced his support for traditional marriage, it's not like their arms are being twisted to buy from Chick-fil-A. For that matter, I can just as easily claim that businesses like Progressive Auto Insurance or Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream contribute money to hate groups like Move On.org.