Pink Crime: Valena Beety
Join us on October 2 at noon/PT as we welcome special guest Valena Beety to discuss her new book Pink Crime: Fighting Against the Criminalization of Motherhood, Pregnancy, and Queer Identity.
Register for this virtual presentation here.
A woman miscarries–and is charged with murder. A new mother tests positive for a drug her hospital administered–and loses custody of her newborn. Four women are convicted of horrific crimes against children they never touched, based on junk science and homophobia–and spend nearly twenty years in prison before being exonerated. A queer teenager takes a photo of a child’s diaper rash at work–and is sentenced to 126 years. These cases are not aberrations. They are symptoms of a system that punishes women and queer people not for what they have done, but for who they are.
In the US, nearly three-quarters of all wrongly convicted women were convicted of crimes that never occurred at all. Valena Beety, co-founder of the Indiana Innocence Project and award-winning legal scholar cited by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, reveals how ordinary tragedies–a child’s sudden death, a husband who dies in his sleep–are transformed by prosecutors into murders that never happened. These “no crime” convictions disproportionately target women and queer people, whose identities are recast as evidence of guilt through bias, junk science, and entrenched stereotypes.
Drawing on devastating real-life cases, Beety exposes how prosecutorial overreach, flawed forensic science, and cultural panic converge–and how fetal personhood laws, the fall of Roe v. Wade, and anti-LGBTQ+ legislation have dramatically expanded the reach of criminal law. What emerges is a chilling portrait of a legal system that increasingly criminalizes pregnancy outcomes, motherhood, and queer identity itself.
Melissa Gira Grant: Policing Pregnant Bodies Post-Dobbs
Join us on July 10 at noon (MST) for a conversation with Melissa Gira Grant about the policing of pregnant bodies in a post-Dobbs landscape.
Click here to watch this virtual presentation.
Melissa Gira Grant is a staff writer at The New Republic; the author of Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work (Verso), which was named a Village Voice favorite book of the year; and the co-director of They Won’t Call It Murder, selected for the 2021 DOC NYC Short List. Her forthcoming book, A Woman Is Against the Law (Little, Brown and Company), is about how the law sees women: as objects of protection, as instruments for disciplining white womanhood, all weaponized in the name of protecting law and order, and only against which has the women’s movement succeeded in claiming freedom.
Dr. Laura Field: Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right
Please join us on May 15 at noon (AZT) as we welcome Laura Field PhD to discuss her new book Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right.
Watch on Secular AZ’s YouTube channel
Donald Trump is not a big thinker, but his 2016 presidential victory presented a grand opportunity for people who are, and it set off a radicalization and reconfiguration of the American conservative intellectual world. In Furious Minds, Laura Field chronicles the rise of the New Right—the network of academics, public intellectuals, and influencers who provide ideological fuel to Trumpism, and to Vice President JD Vance. Perhaps above all else, the MAGA New Right is engaged in a vast culture war against modern liberal pluralism. Field will discuss what inspired her to write the book and provide an overview of the ideological radicalization that is shaping contemporary politics in American and around the world.
Laura K. Field is an associate with the Illiberalism Studies Program at George Washington University, a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution, and visiting scholar in residence at American University. A political theorist by training, she holds a PhD in government from the University of Texas at Austin, and has held faculty positions at Rhodes College in Memphis, Georgetown University, and American University in Washington, DC. In addition to her academic work she has written for The New Republic, Politico, The Bulwark, Le Monde, The New York Times and The Atlantic. Her book Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right is now out with Princeton University Press. She lives in Washington, DC.
FemTech and U.S. Policy: Dr. Chelsea Polis and Candace Gibson
Join us on May 29 at noon (PT) for a conversation with Dr. Chelsea Polis, Principal Research Scientist at the Guttmacher Institute, and Candace Gibson, Director of State Policy at the Guttmacher Institute. They’ll discuss the intersections between FemTech, such as fertility tracking, reproductive justice, and public policy.
Click here to register for this virtual presentation.
Dr. Chelsea Polis is a reproductive health epidemiologist in New York City who works to improve global sexual and reproductive health, including on issues related to contraception, abortion, “FemTech”, infertility, and sexually transmitted infections including HIV. She currently serves as Principal Research Scientist at the Guttmacher Institute. Since 2011, she has held an Associate appointment in the Department of Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Previously, she served as Senior Scientist for Epidemiology at the Population Council’s Center for Biomedical Research and Senior Epidemiological Advisor to the Office of Population and Reproductive Health at USAID. In 2023, she received a John Maddox Prize from Sense about Science and Nature for protecting science and public health by challenging misleading claims by a fertility thermometer manufacturer. Dr. Polis holds a PhD in reproductive health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a BA in medical anthropology from Brown University.
Candace Gibson (she/her) is the Director of State Policy at the Guttmacher Institute, which she joined in 2024. She oversees the Institute’s work to advance evidence-based state-level policies to secure sexual and reproductive health and rights. Previously, Ms. Gibson served as the Director of Government Relations at the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice, where she oversaw the organization’s federal policy and advocacy efforts. As a staff attorney at the National Health Law Program, she created strategies to improve access to and coverage of sexual and reproductive health care for individuals enrolled in Medicaid and in private insurance. Prior to attending law school, Ms. Gibson worked with refugee and immigrant communities to eliminate health inequities at Comunidades Unidas, in Salt Lake City, UT. She has a JD from the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law and received a BA in government and Spanish from Smith College. She was an If/When/How Reproductive Justice Fellow from 2012 to 2014 and was a New Leaders Council Maryland Fellow in 2020. Read her most recent paper here.
Eoin Higgins: “Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left”
Please join us on April 3 at noon (AZT) as we welcome Eoin Higgins to discuss his new book, Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left.
Watch on Secular AZ’s YouTube channel
Eoin Higgins is a journalist based in New England. He is the author of “Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voice on the Left.”
Tia Levings: I Belong to Me
Please join us on March 13 at noon (AZT) as we welcome back Tia Levings to discuss her new book, I Belong to Me: A Survivor’s Guide to Recovery and Hope after Religious Trauma.
Please join us on March 13 at noon (AZT) as we welcome back Tia Levings to discuss her new book, I Belong to Me: A Survivor’s Guide to Recovery and Hope after Religious Trauma.Watch on Secular AZ’s YouTube channel
Tia Levings is the New York Times Bestselling author of A Well-Trained Wife, her memoir of escape from Christian Patriarchy. She writes about the realities of religious trauma, evangelical patriarchy, and the Trad wife life, decoding the fundamentalist influences in our news and culture.
Her work and quotes have appeared in Teen Vogue, Salon, Newsweek, and the HuffingtonPost. She also appeared in the hit Amazon docu-series, Shiny Happy People. Based in Raleigh, North Carolina, she is mom to four incredible adults and likes to travel, hike, paint, and daydream. Find her on social media @TiaLevingsWriter. Her second book, I Belong to Me, releases May 5, 2026.
Learn more about Tia : www.tialevings.com
Pre-order the new book: https://static.macmillan.com/
Religion is Not Done With You: Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst & Megan Goodwin
Join us on January 23 at noon (MST) for a conversation with Dr. Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst & Dr. Megan Goodwin, authors of Religion is Not Done With You: Or, the Hidden Power of Religion on Race, Maps, Bodies, and Law and hosts of Keeping It 101: A Killjoy’s Introduction to Religion.
Click here to watch this virtual presentation.
A smart, irreverent, and accessible guide to thinking more deeply about how religion permeates and shapes the world around us –and why you need to understand the work it’s doing.
Megan Goodwin PhD is an editorial consultant at Religion Dispatches and media & tech consultant for The Crossroads Project. Her research centers on race, religion, gender/sexuality, and politics in what’s now the United States. Her first book, Abusing Religion: Religious Persecution, Sex Scandals, and American Minority Religions is available through Rutgers. Her next project is Cults Inc.: The Business of Bad Religion.
Dr. Morgenstein Fuerst is an associate professor of Religion and the director of the Humanities Center at the University of Vermont. Her formal expertise is in Islam in South Asia, racialization of Muslims, and global histories of imperialism. Her first book, Indian Muslim Minorities & the 1857 Rebellion: Religion, Rebels, and Jihad, is available through Bloomsbury. She is also co-editor of Words of Experience: Translating Islam with Carl W. Ernst (Equinox).
Dr. Sara Moslener: “After Purity: Race, Sex and Religion in White Christian America”
Join us on November 7 at noon (MST) for a conversation with Dr. Sara Moslener!
She’s the lead of the After Purity Project, co-editor of Evangelical Purity Culture and its Discontents, and the forthcoming (Dec 2025) After Purity: Race, Sex and Religion in White Christian America.
Watch this presentation on Secular AZ’s YouTube channel.
Dr. Moslener is a writer, researcher, and lecturer in the Department of Philosophy, Anthropology, and Religion at Central Michigan University where she teaches courses on the history of religious and racial discrimination in the United States. She has been studying evangelical purity culture for over 15 years and has numerous publications including the book Virgin Nation: Sexual Purity and American Adolescence, which demonstrates how sexual purity campaigns and rhetoric have been used by white Protestants since the 19th century to obtain greater political power and cultural influence.
HCR 2025: An Attack on Direct Democracy
Garnet Henderson: LW v Skrmetti and Healthcare Implications for Trans Youth
Please join us on February 14 at noon AZ time (MST) as we welcome reporter Garnet Henderson of Rewire News Group. She’ll discuss the implications of LW v Skrmetti on access to healthcare for trans youth.
Watch on Secular AZ’s YouTube Channel.
Garnet Henderson is the Senior Multiplatform Reporter at Rewire News Group. Prior to joining RNG, she spent a decade as a freelancer reporting on the intersections of health and culture with a particular focus on reproductive health and abortion access. Her work has been published in Cosmopolitan, ELLE, Scientific American, Marie Claire, VICE, Guardian US, WIRED, Glamour, Quartz, The Atlantic, and other publications. Her guide to abortion care in the U.S. was part of the Tonic “Guide to Healthcare,” which won a 2018 Deadline Club Award. In 2020, Garnet created ACCESS: A Podcast About Abortion, which she hosts and produces as a solo project. In 2022, she was one of the inaugural grantees of the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Reproductive Rights Reporting Fund for a project that was co-published in The Nation and on ACCESS. Garnet was born and raised in Jackson, Wyoming, and has lived in New York City since 2009.
EducateUS & Jaclyn Friedman: The Importance of Comprehensive Sex Ed
Join us on March 28 at noon (AZ Time) for special guest Jaclyn Friedman, Founder and Executive Director of EducateUS.
Join us on March 28 at noon (AZ Time) for special guest Jaclyn Friedman, Founder and Executive Director of EducateUS.Click here to register for this virtual presentation.
Jaclyn Friedman is the Founder and Executive Director of EducateUS, where she’s building a movement for universal sex education. A lifelong activist, advocate and organizer. Friedman’s work globally popularized the affirmative consent standard of sexual consent. Her first book, Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape, was one of Publisher’s Weekly’s Top 100 Books of 2009, and has inspired new laws in five U.S. states, as well as policies on countless campuses across the country and the world. She also spearheaded the legendary #FBrape campaign, which forced Facebook to address and exclude content that promotes or trivializes violence against women under their hate speech policy.
Org summary: EducateUS is building a movement of voters laser-focused on advancing sex education across the country. We believe that universal sex education can change the world. Our ultimate goal is to bring about a complete transformation of K-12 public sex education in the United States, in order to foster a new generation of Americans who are secure in their own bodily sovereignty, recognize and respect that sovereignty in everyone else regardless of race, place, creed, class or gender, know all the essential facts about how bodies work, and are fully prepared to build loving relationships with themselves and others.