A common refrain being heard from conservative Christians is that parents should be the ones to make medical decisions when their children are unable to make their wishes known, ignoring any decisions or wishes expressed by the spouse. This contradicts centuries of civil law as well as biblical principles.

According to The State:

You have a husband who hasn’t been faithful, and he’s the one the judges all listen to,” the Sarasota woman said from a protest line outside the hospice where Schiavo is in her second week without food or water. “There’s nothing like a mother. A mother knows her child, and nobody else should be able to make that decision.” Some Christian conservatives and others who want to prolong Schiavo’s life do not understand why her husband gets to decide her fate. But the role of the spouse as next of kin and decision-maker has deep roots in civil and biblical law.

“It’s odd that conservative Christians would be making this claim,” said Christopher Schroeder, director of the public law program at Duke University. “You can find biblical passages that say once you have a union like this, the union’s all that matters. The parents drop out of the picture.” ... In Genesis 2:24, it reads: “Therefore, a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh.”

The fact that people are so willing to ignore tradition, law, and the Bible helps demonstrate just how far from conservatism they have traveled. Their philosophy has ceased to be "conservative" and is now full-blown radicalism — a radical ideology about imposing narrow (and not always biblical) standards of morality on all aspects of people's lives, regardless of what they would want for themselves.

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