So, who do you vote for? I know you, like I, probably do not vote Democrat. And I assume you do not stay home on election day. Do you hold your nose and vote Republican, or do you go out on a limb and vote Libertarian? Are they, these days, really farther from the normal conservative line than Republicans?

RP: I live in D.C., so I don’t have a House member to vote for. In general, though, I think people are best off voting for the candidate they think best rather than casting their vote based on speculation about the overall political effects of a particular set of election results.

Is Linker’s book really subtitled Secular America Under Siege? I await anguished protests from the same people who complained about your book. . . . Does it really bring people together to portray secular Americans as “under siege”? Is that an invitation to dialogue?

RP: Yes, that is the subtitle, which seems harmless enough to me.

So what if Lukas had judged other women’s choices? Is expressing a judgment necessarily paternalistic and coercive? If that’s what libertarian feminism is about, count me out. . .

RP: Shannon Chamberlain, Reason’s reviewer, used rhetoric loose enough to make this criticism plausible, but I think there’s a more charitable reading of the review. I take it that the concern isn’t with adverse judgments of other people’s choices so much as it is with the idea that there’s a single right choice that all women should make with regard to, say, staying at home to raise kids. That idea scants the local and contingent circumstances that will necessarily inform any particular woman’s choice. But I took Lukas to be presenting arguments about, for example, the advantages of staying at home to raise kids while acknowledging that different women will legitimately make different choices depending on their situations, values, etc.