Congress will soon have the opportunity to create legislation that, through the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), will ban employers of 15 or more employees from discrimination with regards to employees’ sexual orientation or gender identity. Currently, 21 states have bans on workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation, and 12 have bans on discrimination based on gender identity.

“It’s about time,” many of you are probably thinking. After all, race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age and disability status are all protected.

This line of thinking, however, assumes that all currently-protected classes actually should be protected.

This process of giving rights to employees infringes on the rights of employers. The hiring process is a mutual agreement between two entities — employer and employee — to trade the employee’s labor for the employer’s money.

But thanks to things like Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and potentially ENDA if it passes, this trade is no longer necessarily a mutual agreement.

The passage of ENDA would allow — and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act already does allow – employers to be forced to give their money to someone for services they don’t want that particular employee to perform. For example, if an employer, for whatever reason, does not wish to trade labor for money with a homosexual, ENDA would not allow that particular desire to be a hiring factor. If an employer, for whatever reason, does not wish to trade labor for money with someone based on thier sex, religion or race, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prevents those factors from becoming a hiring variable.

The government’s control over this money is a direct violation of the employer’s property rights.

Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, which outlines the scope of the government’s legislative power, grants the federal government no power to regulate what Americans are and are not allowed to spend their money on.

Because this money belongs to the employer, not the government, a list of perfectly acceptable reasons for an employer to hire or not hire someone includes, but is not limited to someone who is: Black, white, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, a Scientologist, male, female, Canadian, French, American, homosexual, old, young, in a wheelchair, missing an eye, undergoing a sex-change, a Republican, a Democrat, a Nazi, a Vietnam veteran, fat, skinny, a friend, a relative, ugly, smelly, a felon, a Hawkeye, a vegetarian, married, pregnant or even because he writes newspaper columns that you consider to be insensitive.

Since the money belongs to employers, it is they, and not the government, that should have the right to choose who to engage or not engage in trading that money with for any reason that they choose. If employers want to assume the risk of missing out on hiring a more qualified candidate due to their own ignorance, it’s their loss. But it should also be their decision. If the government prevents them from making this decision, then it is not really the employer’s money at all. It is the government’s money.

The federal government has quietly overstepped its bounds. To protect the rights of citizens to exercise control over their own money, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act should not be passed and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act should be eliminated. Every time our government is allowed to mandate what we can and cannot do with our own money, no matter how good the intention, our money becomes less our own and more the government’s.

Blake Hasenmiller is a senior in industrial engineering and ecomonics from DeWitt.