Another day, another round of hypocrisy and manufactured outrage by Florida’s political left-wing: In the latest fake upset, a Halloween-coalition of the state’s LGBT lobby and GOP establishment hacks have set their sights on one of the state’s two black Republican legislators.

Rep. Mike Hill (YouTube screen grab, cropped)

In a sane world, Rep. Mike Hill’s flippant dismissal would be taken to mean that the proposal was so ridiculous he obviously could not and did not take it seriously.

In fact, no normal person would take offense at Hill’s response. Not being normal people, that has not stopped Republican leaders in the state legislature from joining state Democrats in demanding that Hill -- who made history in 2013 when he became the Florida Panhandle's first black Republican elected to the Legislature in 126 years -- apologize for his nonendorsement of sodomy laws or resign from office.

Yeah, good luck with that.

Mike Hill deserves a strong show of support by his colleagues, and an apology from Republican leadership.

Not a single person honestly believes that Hill is contemplating sponsorship of legislation to put homosexuals to death. Everyone knows that the real target of this latest brouhaha isn’t this utterly un-newsworthy incident, but any opposition whatsoever to the LGBT political agenda, which under the guise of “non-discrimination” really is advocating and implementing the physical persecution, by the state, of peaceful Americans who simply do not wish to affirm or accommodate homosexualist and transgenderist ideology and lifestyle choices.

Republican legislators and other men of goodwill in positions of cultural and political influence need to start calling LGBT activists out on this. And for that matter, start calling them out on their claims to represent homosexuals and transgendered persons in the first place.

Laws, by their very nature, are not recommendations. When mainstream political leftists and their useful Republican idiots in state legislatures propose private-sector nondiscrimination laws, they are literally (not metaphorically) threatening to put people out of business for peaceably expressing their disapproval of homosexual acts and of the LGBT political agenda; they are literally (not metaphorically) threatening to haul them off to jail if they refuse to close down their businesses or pay whatever fines are imposed on them for noncompliance; and they are literally (not metaphorically) threatening to kill them or bash in their skulls if they resist arrest.

This is not right-wing hysteria: This is literally (not metaphorically) how all laws are enforced.

All across the country, Democratic governments, spurred on by the LGBT lobby, literally are persecuting people for their refusal to participate in same-sex marriage ceremonies, rituals that roughly half of the country believes amount to celebrations of grave immorality. And if Florida Democrats, and a not-insignificant number of state Republican legislators, have their way, Florida’s Christians, conservatives, and other morally sane persons are next on the chopping block.

This needs to stop, as does the now-meaningless invocation of “homophobia” against any individual who takes a principled stand against homosexualist ideology and the LGBT political agenda. Hating people for no other reason than the fact they suffer from homosexual proclivities? Yes, that would be a reasonable definition of homophobia. But simply believing that homosexual affections are disordered, that homosexual acts are immoral, and that same-sex marriage is an absurdity are not “homophobic” positions; they are eminently reasonable and principled convictions that can be and have been defended (to varying degrees) by literally every civilized society in the world up to ten minutes ago, on explicit or implicit natural law grounds.

A defense of classical natural law theory and a rebuttal to all of the (mostly superficial) objections to it are well beyond the scope of this column, but suffice it to say that the notion that opposition to the LGBT agenda is rooted in irrational bigotry, and not in serious philosophical reflection, is the worst sort of fake news.

And speaking of which, equally fake is the notion that the LGBT political establishment speaks for all (or even most) homosexuals, or for all (or most) people who suffer from gender identity disorders. LGBTism is a distinctly postmodern political ideology, and the vast majority of persons throughout history who have experienced homosexual impulses, engaged in homosexual acts, or suffered from gender dysphoria have not subscribed to it. There are untold numbers of homosexuals who decline to engage in homosexual acts, and untold numbers of homosexuals who do engage in homosexual acts while believing those acts are immoral, that they ought not to be affirmed or encouraged by civil society, that marriage is necessarily a heterosexual institution, and that orphaned children should normally be adopted by a married mother and father. Likewise, there are untold numbers of gender-dysphoric persons who do not subscribe to the postmodern distinction between sex and gender, who don’t want to mutilate their bodies to conform to their dysphoric affections, and who simply want to be comfortable being the sex they objectively are.

Homosexual and “transgendered” persons make up a minuscule proportion of the American population, and it is far from clear that most of them subscribe to LGBTism and its political agenda. That agenda ought to be resisted by legislators and policymakers on substantive moral grounds, but at the very least someone should demand that its advocates prove that they actually do speak for the minorities they claim to represent before they’re taken seriously as a political force.

Eric Giunta is a member of the Florida Bar.