“Here’s a principle: the government should stay out of living rooms, bedrooms and marital bonds. That used to be called conservatism.” The trouble is, that’s a slogan, not a principle. I think SMTPs would have a hard time taking it seriously as a principle. They might think that if, say, a husband were killing his wife in the bedroom, maybe the government should step in. There are circumstances in which all SMTPs would support the government’s getting involved. It’s possible that two equally sane, moderate, thoughtful people might disagree about the proper governmental response to the kind of fact pattern you have in the Schiavo case. (Really! There are SMTPs out there who disagree with Andrew Sullivan!) But either one of them, presumably, would want to draw a line somewhere to prevent at least some spousal killings. You can certainly make an argument for drawing that line with a bias toward letting spouses do as they wish, although I would not myself agree with that argument. But asserting that government should “stay out of the bedroom” (and, I guess, hospital), and that all SMTPs agree about this, does not strike me as advancing that (or any other reasonable) argument.