Doing What’s Available: A Humanist’s Guide to Activism
It’s hard to capture the full force of our award recipient’s impact in just a few words, but if I had to try, I’d say “bold” and “unwavering.” She’s a member of the Nebraska Legislature, representing the Eighth Legislative District in Omaha. In her second four-year term as the first openly humanist and atheist member of the Nebraska State Legislature, Megan Hunt is redefining what it means to lead with principle. She stands out not just for her values, but for how she lives them.
In one of the most conservative legislatures in the country, Megan has been quite successful. She has introduced 45 bills and resolutions and co-sponsored 131 bills since she was elected in 2018. Fifty-six of these bills have passed and were signed by the governor. Megan understands firsthand how to build coalitions as a progressive and how to succeed together without asking anyone to compromise their values.
Her accomplishments speak volumes. Sen. Hunt has introduced over a dozen bills on topics ranging from codifying civil rights protections for LGBTQ Nebraskans, expanding eligibility for SNAP benefits, increasing the minimum wage, and ensuring sexual assault survivors have access to emergency contraception and medically accurate information. She is fearless in calling out injustice, uncompromising in defense of the vulnerable, and strategic in building alliances that actually get things done. In a time when the religious right is trying to redraw the boundaries of democracy, Megan Hunt is charting a course rooted in liberty, inclusion, and dignity for all.
But that’s not all. Megan is a serial entrepreneur and community builder. She currently runs two businesses: Five Nine, a specialty shop selling stationery, paper goods, and practical art, and Ceremony, an online store and showroom with a carefully selected collection of new, reworked, and vintage clothing. Her other entrepreneurial accomplishments include founding Safe Space Nebraska, co-founding Majorette, and founding CAMP coworking, Hello Holiday, and Princess Lasertron. She has also been a board member of the Omaha Area Youth Orchestras and is an executive board member of CHEER Nebraska.
She is a leader in reproductive freedom, public health, religious equality, and Midwest-Canada relations. She is on the board of Friends of Planned Parenthood of the Heartland and is a trustee in the Business Ethics Alliance. Whether it’s founding a business or defending science and human rights, Megan leads with both vision and grit. She has received a lot of recognition for her work, including the 2024 NABCO Legislator of the Year award and the 2023 Women of Excellence Award from the National Foundation for Women Legislators, among many others.
As her bio demonstrates, Sen. Hunt is a very involved leader in her community, not just in the state legislature. She does so as her authentic self. She believes in transparency and doing the best work she can to make sure people of all faiths and beliefs are represented. She also had the good fortune of working alongside another amazing leader of our movement and a previous awardee, former Nebraska State Senator Ernie Chambers. Since Nebraska senators are limited to two consecutive terms, Megan’s term ends in 2026, so we’ll have to watch what she does next.
The American Humanist Association is proud to present the 2025 Religious Liberty Award to Nebraska State Senator Megan Hunt, in recognition of her courageous leadership, her entrepreneurial spirit and her belief that democracy must serve everyone.
MEGAN HUNT: Wow, I just got here, and you’re describing someone who sounds really cool. It’s a little hard to believe the things I have accomplished, but of course, with a very robust team behind me and standing on the shoulders of generations of fighters and workers and activists and elected officials who have started this work and continued it. I only continue their legacy as well as I can.
My background is in entrepreneurship, as you said. I’ve been a business owner in my district for about 20 years. I’m a shop girl, I run retail stores, and I’m also a public school parent and a single mom. I was part of a group of people in Omaha who were realizing that our city had the highest rates of STDs and STIs in the entire country. We realized this was a public health crisis, and something we could do to fix it was to make sure our schools were teaching age-appropriate, medically accurate, research-based sex education.
Long story short, we worked with Omaha Public Schools and the school board, and we did it. It was very hard. There were physical fist fights at school board meetings and death threats, and it was as hard as you can possibly imagine. But we did do it. And when we had that progressive win in a conservative state, in a relatively conservative community, that was like the best drug I’ve ever taken. That was like a high I want to feel forever.
After that win, I started to realize that people were seeing me not just as a business leader, but maybe I could be a political leader. I really believe that if you notice that people are following you, paying attention to you, and asking you to take on more responsibility as a leader, you kind of have to do that.
The reason we have the problems we have in this country, whether we’re talking about Congress or we’re talking about city council, is because good people don’t run. I want all of you to think about that. If that’s you or it’s someone you know, maybe you need to keep nudging them along. It’s worth it.
When I was elected, I became the first openly atheist, I suppose, person in the legislature. You did mention Sen. Ernie Chambers, my mentor, who came before me, and he’s not a person of faith, so I would say that he [was the first]. I also became the first out LGBTQ person elected in Nebraska, and I became the first woman elected to my seat. I’m proud to have that honor and hope to hold the door behind me for whoever comes next.
I first became connected to this organization a couple of years ago when a senator introduced a bill in Nebraska to prevent kids from going to drag shows or something. It was one of those anti-drag bills that you see in every other state. I introduced an amendment to that bill saying, “Okay, and also kids can’t go to church camp, and also kids can’t go to youth group and all of these places where we know they’re getting preyed upon.” That was when a lot of people in the atheist community and the media started to reach out to me and say, “Do you want to do an interview? Do you want to come on my podcast?”
It’s always sort of fun to point out the hypocrisy in people’s values, especially when they are legislating or leading from what they think is a very values-based perspective. This year, just about a month ago, we blocked a bill. It was another model bill where an organization takes the bus to a public school and takes kids to church during the school day for up to two hours. They tell these kids if they get two of their friends to come, they’ll have a popcorn party or they’ll all get a t-shirt, and they send these kids back to public school with all their candy, their t-shirts, and their goodies.
I serve on the Education Committee in Nebraska, and we had that bill come through my committee, and it did get out of committee. It was part of a package of education bills and was a kind of “poison pill” where everybody’s pointing a gun at each other. I said, “Let’s blow the whole thing up. I don’t like it. I don’t think that we should have these little baby wins that Republicans let us get away with so that all the public school kids are pressured to go to church.”
I introduced an amendment on the floor that I literally wrote up during my time speaking and filed it to remove that portion from the bill. It did pass by one vote. We don’t have that [church bussing program] in Nebraska because of that quick thinking and because my colleagues had the sense to go along with me on that.
I’m not a genius. But there are times in this work in politics where you realize how close you came to something really destructive and negative happening if not for some very quick thinking. We need more people like this in the rooms where laws are made. I’m talking about diversity of thought. In Nebraska, we’ve never had a Jewish senator, we’ve never had a Muslim state senator. When you look at the population that we represent, but everybody who represents them is a white Christian, that’s not representation. We need to have more people in the mix with more voices and experiences that we can learn from.
It feels really surreal to be recognized for something as basic as defending people’s right to live in peace, to believe what they want to believe and to be who they are without fear and without apology. Right now, individual liberty is in peril in a way that I’ve never seen in my lifetime. There has never been a more dire time for us looking forward at where our rights might be. We’re in the dark ages if we’re saying that if a teacher is going to talk about some gay stuff they’ve got to tell the parents that in advance so they can opt out of it. This is thought police. This is controlling people’s speech. It’s anti-First Amendment and that’s anti-American. We are talking about liberty, bodily autonomy, freedom of thought and the freedom to exist as yourself.
I will speak for myself: I did not realize how quickly the onslaught of these things would come on, like ICE arrests, people getting disappeared, and a resurgence of both Islamophobia and anti-Semitism. I think it’s a good thing for power to keep us stupid. It’s a matter of mental hygiene, and we all need to be really aware of that to stay sharp and protect our ability to think critically and live consciously. These attacks on liberty are not separate issues. They are symptoms of the same sickness, which is the dehumanization of all people to preserve power for the few.
Sen. Ernie Chambers, one of the most important people in my life, told me something that has become a mantra for me. During an abortion ban debate in my first year in the legislature, he didn’t help me filibuster, and I was mad about it. After we lost, he came up to me and asked me, “Did you do your best?” I said, “Yes”. He said, “Could you have done any more?” I said, “No”. Then he said, “Well, then how can anyone ask any more of you?” I think about that all the time.
Another thing he always says is, “Success is doing what’s available for me to do”. Success might not be winning. It might just be doing what’s available for you to do, and that’s a different question.
You can’t have liberty without truth. You can’t have it without bodily autonomy, without racial justice, without housing justice, without the ability to read whatever book you want and learn history as it really happened. To be a humanist is to recognize that we share that responsibility for each other, but also that we don’t do the work alone. We stand on the shoulders of generations of people who have done this work, and we do not have to finish it. We just have to do what’s available for us to do.