Hate crime spree, attack on Idaho librarian are products of our sick political culture | Opinion

Matthew Lehigh, an Oregon man who committed a hate crime spree in Boise in October, pleaded guilty on Thursday. He faces 37 to 45 months in federal prison, among other sanctions.

Why did he do it?

Lehigh was clearly disturbed. His state-level charges were ultimately dismissed after he was judged incompetent to assist in his own defense at first. His YouTube channel was full of video journals where he asserted that he was possessed by demons. His plea agreement mandates that he see a psychiatrist after his release and that he take prescribed medication. So it might be tempting to write off his crimes as entirely idiomatic, just an effect of his mental health issues.

That would be a mistake. Lehigh’s mental illness explains some of what he did but by no means all of it.

One clear pattern in his crimes is bigotry. Lehigh assaulted a transgender woman, then tried to run over a security guard who intervened. He tried to run over two women he thought were lesbians. He set fire to a pride flag. He vandalized an LGBTQ community center.

Another pattern is that he acted on the belief that what he was doing was a religious duty. He assaulted a man in a supermarket because he thought his jacket had occult symbols on it, screaming an anti-gay slur at him before hitting him, according to the plea agreement. He vandalized a local LGBTQ-affirming church because “he believes that the Bible mandates rejection and condemnation of (individuals) who pursue same-sex romantic relationships and individuals whose gender identity does not correspond with their biological sex,” according to the plea.

But another element in his hate crime spree was the current political culture. No other incident demonstrates this more clearly than what he did on Oct. 8, 2022.

“(W)hile at the Boise Public Library Main Branch in downtown Boise, Matthew Alan Lehigh, 31, approached a transgender library employee, called her a slur, punched her, and threatened to stab her,” the U.S. Department of Justice said in a news release.

Only in our uniquely ridiculous time — when librarians, of all people, have become the enemies of the culture warriors on the right — would a librarian be one of the chief targets of a hate crime spree.

A significant portion of the 2022 legislative session had been spent trying to make librarians personally criminally liable for books on the shelves, and the debate surrounding that bill was replete with the repeated lie that librarians were giving porn to kids.

A few months later, Lehigh assaulted a transgender library worker while screaming slurs at her and threatening to stab her.

The influence of Christian nationalism in Idaho, efforts to target transgender kids, efforts to impose book bans and other forms of censorship have all been on the rise in recent years.

And Lehigh couldn’t be charged under Idaho’s malicious harassment statute, as the Statesman previously reported, because it only makes it the state equivalent of a hate crime to target people on the basis of “race, color, religion, ancestry, or national origin.” There’s nothing protecting sexual orientation or gender identity — as the legislative majority knew and did nothing about this year.

Lawmakers pushing for book bans and targeting the transgender community for state persecution are not responsible for what Lehigh did, but their rhetoric is not irrelevant to what he did either.

Even deranged lone wolves act within a cultural context and take cues from it.

And our culture is deeply, deeply sick.

Bryan Clark is an opinion writer for the Idaho Statesman based in eastern Idaho.