Ohio employers have plenty of requirements and standards for employees. As the people best equipped to understand what is necessary to run their own businesses — while keeping employees healthy and safe — policymakers generally allow employers to uphold those standards.

For example, a restaurant owner who required kitchen workers to wear a hair net or otherwise keep hair out of food (and away from flame) would not be frowned upon for disciplining an employee who failed to follow that health and safety rule.

A couple of Ohio lawmakers, apparently desperate for Columbus to have even more control, don’t see it that way. Back in November, state Reps. Jennifer Gross, R-West Chester, and Scott Wiggam, R-Wayne County, introduced House Bill 319.

According to a report by the Ohio Capital Journal, the bill says “A business, employer, including an administrator or supervisor, health plan issuer, health care provider, hospital, institution, nursing home, person, political subdivision, private college, public official, residential care facility, state agency, or state institution of higher education,” cannot deny or terminate employment, deny service, or otherwise treat differently an individual based on an “individual’s refusal of any biologic, vaccine, pharmaceutical, drug, gene editing technology, RNA-based product, or DNA-based product for reasons of conscience, including religious convictions.”

As so many who think along the same lines have done, Gross said during an April 9 hearing on the bill, “With the founding of this great nation, two principles at the root of our constitution include: protecting the liberties of the individual and protecting our freedom of religion.”

One wonders whether Gross has read about George Washington mandating that all Continental soldiers be inoculated against smallpox, in 1777.

As the National Park Service put it, “many historians credit the medical mandate with the colonists’ victory in the Revolutionary War and the creation of the United States of America.”

George Washington understood nearly 250 years ago that requiring his troops to get inoculated was necessary to complete the mission. It’s not hard to imagine how he might have reacted if a government hundreds of miles away had told him he couldn’t discipline those who did not comply.

This and similar attempts to centralize power are reminders there is a small but vocal number in the party that once stood firmly for small government and local control who have either lost their way or are intentionally abusing their label.

That should have true Republicans seeing red.