Conservatives who oppose including the LGBTQ community in hate-crimes protections in states like Idaho—which, despite being one of the first states to pass a hate-crimes law in the early ‘80s, has never included anti-LGBTQ bias in its criminal categories—often justify their positions by claiming that such laws give the queer community “special rights” by making them a “protected class.” It doesn’t seem to occur to them that by omitting the third-most common kind of hate crime from their laws, they’re giving a green light for violent bigots to target that community.
That reality hit home in Boise this month, when another far-right transplant to Idaho—a 31-year-old man named Matthew Lehigh, who spent the previous month loading up video rants to YouTube in which he expressed his desire to bring violence to the gay community —conducted a sequence of anti-LGBTQ hate crimes: threatening members of the community with his car, vandalizing a community center, and setting residents’ Pride flags afire. Despite the clear bias motivation involved in the crimes, Idaho authorities are unable to charge him under the state’s malicious-harassment statute because hatred of the queer community isn’t included.
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Lehigh, who says in his videos that he recently moved to the state from western Oregon and also appears to have been living in his car, was arrested last week after two women reported that he attempted to run them over with his car in downtown Boise while shouting homophobic slurs at them. Police said they had been seeking him already in connection with a similar incident four days before in the downtown area.
The women said they were standing next to their own vehicle when Lehigh drove past, shouted homophobic slurs at them, then turned his car towards them as if to hit them. They said they dodged his car, which then struck theirs, after which he drove away at high speed. Police found him two hours later, parked in his car about four miles away, and took him into custody. He was booked on $1 million bond for three felony counts of assault.
After his arrest, Lehigh reportedly admitted to police that he had been responsible for a series of attacks on the LGBTQ community on Oct. 4 in which Pride flags hanging on residents’ front porches were set aflame, and a community center that served the LGBTQ community was vandalized, two of its front windows shattered. He may now face new counts in those cases.
During the same period in which he was carrying out his crime spree, Lehigh posted a series of nearly 30 videos to his YouTube channel—which remains active, with 182 subscribers—in which he ranted about his belief that homosexuals should be put to death, and that LGBTQ outreach in Christian churches is an “abomination.”
“If I go to church and I find there’s a homosexual in there, I will fight them,” he said in one video. “I might fight them with a weapon, I might kill them in the church if that’s what that takes.”
Ranting from the driver’s seat of his car, Lehigh told his audience that when they see a rainbow flag, “that is a correlation to human trafficking,” and that having drag queens speak with children “is the equivalent of some form of rape.” Describing his response to a video of such a discussion, he said: “My heart started pounding really badly when I saw that video. If I would have been there, I would have attacked those people, um, very violently.”
He complained that police won’t act to prevent such events because “they’re afraid of the hate crime. But we need to grow a pair as a culture … and we need to do something about these people in our communities.”
The day of his arrest, he posted a brief video in which he told his viewers that he had been trying to post a fresh video, but “I literally keep filming and demons start screaming through me!”
Burning Pride flags has become something of a nationwide trend. In addition to the burnings in Boise, in recent months, Pride flags have been set afire in Brookline, Massachusetts; in Lansing, Michigan; and in Baltimore, where the arson fires spread to the townhouses where the flags were hung, destroying four of them. The trend is part of the far right’s virulent eliminationist campaign directed at the LGBTQ community that has been gaining momentum since last spring.
Even before this most recent onslaught, anti-LGBTQ hate crimes were already the third-most numerous of their kind in the U.S., according to the FBI, which most recently reported (in 2019) that bias crimes motivated by sexual/gender orientation comprised 16.8% of all hate crimes in the U.S.
As Grace Hauck explained then in USA Today, the FBI’s statistics are well known to undercount anti-LGBTQ hate crimes, primarily due to the victims’ reluctance to report the crimes to police, both out of a distrust of police and because doing so would officially out them to their communities.
“To the extent that we don’t have universal protections from discrimination on the basis of employment, housing, and public accommodations, if someone comes forward to report a hate crime, they could also be officially outing themselves as LGBTQ. In a smaller or rural community, that outing could result in an eviction or loss of a job,” said Robin Maril, Human Rights Campaign Associate Legal Director.
A better gauge is the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), where the data indicates that nearly 200,000 hate crimes occur in the U.S. each year, while the FBI annually estimates about 7,500. The NCVS data also indicates that bias against sexual orientation comprises the largest percentage of all categories of motivation. Certainly, as the Southern Poverty Law Center found in 2010, among all the minority groups victimized by violent hate crime, LGBTQ people are far and away the most likely targets—a fact reaffirmed by the New York Times in 2016.
In spite of this, Idaho has never included anti-LGBTQ bigotry among the categories of bias motivation in its hate-crimes law, legally termed a malicious-harassment statute. First passed in 1983, it only enhances sentences for crimes committed with “intent to intimidate or harass another person because of that person’s race, color, religion, ancestry, or national origin.” A handful of Democratic legislators—notably Melissa Wintrow, a Boise-based state senator—have attempted to introduce bills to include “sexual orientation and gender identity” to the law, but have been steadfastly rebuffed by the Republicans who have long dominated the Statehouse.
But then, Idaho Republicans have a noteworthy history of refusing to protect the LGBTQ community from discrimination in the state. The state’s anti-discrimination law, the Idaho Human Rights Act—which forbids discriminating against residents for employment or housing on the basis of race, color, religion, or sex—has long omitted both “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” from its protections. Democratic legislators have long fought to “add the words,” as the annual organized campaign to do so puts it, but Republicans have stubbornly refused. In 2015, dozens of protesters—including a number of legislators—were arrested inside the Statehouse while demanding the change. That response stands in stark contrast in how Republicans responded when armed far-right extremists led by Ammon Bundy took over the Statehouse in 2020.
Wintrow’s attempt to reform the malicious-harassment law was inspired by the 2016 murder of Steven Nelson, a 49-year-old Idaho man who was beaten to death for being gay—but Republicans refused to give her legislation a hearing. “I felt it was essential to put it there,” Wintrow told the Idaho Statesman. “It sends a message about what we value and it’s that we value you as community members.”
Dan Prinzing, executive director of the Boise-based Wassmuth Center for Human Rights, says he’s been frustrated by the lack of an effective law for dealing with one of the most common—and one of the most frequently violent—kinds of hate crime.
“Law enforcement can only do so much. Prosecution can only go so far,” Prinzing told the Associated Press. “Idaho lacks a clear definition of what is a hate crime.”
The most pernicious aspect of hate crimes is that they work. Hate crimes have the fully intended effect of driving away and deterring the presence of any kind of hated minority—racial, religious, ethnic, or sexual/gender. They are essentially acts of terrorism directed at entire communities of people, and they are message crimes: "Keep out."
Perhaps of equal significance are the real-world ramifications of this fear for minorities and the places they fear to visit: an impoverishment of the nation's democratic underpinnings. As Yale University professor and hate-crime expert Donald Green points out, hate crimes succeed in making the nation indeed a smaller place for people of color, members of minority religions like Jews, and gays and lesbians.
"I think if you had to kind of step back and ask, 'Does hate crime pay?,' you'd say yes," Green says. "If the point of hate crimes is to terrorize the population into maintaining boundaries between these perpetrators and the victimized populations, at least in some areas -- certain parts of town, certain parts of the country, et cetera -- you know, certain kinds of romantic relationships, whatever -- then it does succeed in that. I think of that as a massive dead-weight loss of freedom. Just the fact that people feel less than free in a free country is a tragedy."
Idaho, in essence, has used its laws not only to put out an “Unwelcome for LGBTQ” sign, but to enable by omission any hateful violence that gets whipped into being by eliminationist rhetoric—to give a flashing green light to violent men like Matt Lehigh.
As Bryan Clark observed in the Statesman:
The old adage is that the law “is no respecter of persons”—that is, it treats all people and groups equally. In Idaho, that is not true. It is not true because Idaho’s majority has allowed the LGBTQ community to have second-class legal status.
