US congressional candidate criticized over LGBTQ seminars in youth program

US Democratic congressional candidate Randy Villegas was criticized on July 27 over his involvement in California’s 2018 Central Valley Freedom Summer program. The project gave high school and college students civic-engagement training, including seminars on LGBTQ topics, while some participants worked with community organizations in California’s Central Valley. The criticism followed a Breitbart report .

Breitbart described Villegas as a socialist and the program’s partner organizations as radical. Republican National Committee spokesperson Nick Poche told the outlet that the project turned children into supporters of the far left at taxpayers’ expense. The report did not include Villegas’s response to the allegations.

An academic article about the project , co-authored by Villegas in 2019, describes Central Valley Freedom Summer as a nonpartisan voter-registration and civic-education initiative for low-income youth. Its curriculum included sessions on immigrant rights, environmental justice, and ethnic, gender and LGBTQ studies. According to the authors, participants registered more than 4,000 voters, while 578 people attended intensive conferences and arts-based activities.

LOUD for Tomorrow says it was founded in 2018 by high school and college students from the program after an internship with an environmental justice organization. LOUD says its vision includes the well-being of young people of color, immigrants and the LGBTQ community. Another organization linked to the project by Breitbart, the Madera Coalition for Community Justice, now runs the local Madera Rainbow Coalition LGBTQ group . These sources confirm an LGBTQ component in the organizations’ work, but do not use Breitbart’s characterization of teenagers being “radicalized.”

Villegas is a political science lecturer and a Visalia school board member. As CalMatters reported , he won more than 32% of the vote in the June primary and advanced to the general election in California’s 22nd District. The Democrat will face incumbent Republican Representative David Valadao in November.