That’s not what equal protections meant though. It just meant you can’t refuse to serve a customer based on their protected statuses like religion or sexual orientation.

If a church calls you to order a cake but you were planning to take time off work for a while, you could still say no. It was only a problem if you say “no, I don’t bake cakes for Christians”. That’s not slavery. You can stop working, nobody was forcing you. Just that when you do work, you can’t discriminate.