Shannon Chamberlain, in Reason, writes that Carrie Lukas is guilty of “appalling condescension” toward women. Lukas is supposedly a “rightist critic[] of women’s choices” who refuses “to see women as autonomous beings, capable of weighing alternatives and arriving at conclusions based on information about individual circumstances that the commanders of the Mommy Wars simply can’t possess. . . . [W]hat’s missing is a cool-headed free market analysis, which would regard women as actors in an arena of choices, without the conceit of top-down management.”

I’ve haven’t finished Lukas’s book, but this critique surprised me, since Lukas, a friend of mine, is pretty libertarian herself. Lukas’s defense makes the obvious points in response: She isn’t criticizing other women’s choices, but rather providing information that might help women make choices. There’s nothing anti-free market about that; indeed, markets couldn’t function without someone playing that role. Now, if the information that Lukas provides is inaccurate or misleading, then she deserves criticism–and Chamberlain takes a stab at making an argument (a confused and weak argument, to my mind) to that effect. But for the most part, her take seems to be that offering information or a perspective amounts to judging other women, which is per se bad. And Reason’s comeback to Lukas just sidesteps the issues in favor of lame attempts at snarkiness.

It’s the sort of thing that makes me wonder whether Reason isn’t more committed to its version of libertarian cultural politics than it is to, well, libertarianism.