Italian Politician in Trouble Over Remarks on Single Mothers

Rocco Buttiglione, Silvio Berlusconi's nominee as Italy's European commissioner, was back under fire at the weekend after appearing to disparage single mothers.

As Mr Buttiglione protested that he was the victim of a "hate campaign", there were signs of a growing exasperation with his propensity for gaffes.

Last week he said homosexuality was "a sin", and that marriage existed for women to have children and be protected by their husband. On Monday, a committee of MEPs rejected him, the first time an assembly panel had ever voted against a nominee. Socialist MEPs threatened on Thursday to reject the entire new EU executive if he kept his job.

Then, on Friday, he told a conference: "Children who have only a mother are the children of a not very good mother." He quickly issued a statement saying his remarks had been totally distorted; he had in fact been talking, in metaphors, about relations between the US and Europe.

His remark stepped up the pressure on the commission president, Jose Manuel Barroso, either to ditch him or give him a portfolio other than justice, security and civil liberties, in the commission drawn up by Mr Barroso to replace that of Romano Prodi.

Yesterday, Mr Buttiglione backtracked further, and told Corriere della Sera: "Single girls who keep a child and bring it up when it is so easy to abort are heroines of our times."

Mr Buttiglione, a conservative Christian Democrat who is at present Italy's minister for Europe, blamed the campaign against him on an anti-Christian tendency in EU institutions that he said amounted to Berufsverbot, the West German term for its cold war ban on communists and far-leftists in public employment: "Now Europe wants to retrieve it [ Berufsverbot ], but in an anti-Christian way. It's about whether we have to accept a new orthodoxy and a new Inquisition, but an anti-Christian one, or whether we should follow Voltaire's famous phrase, 'I deplore the things you say but I will defend with my life your right to say them.'"

La Stampa, a newspaper usually behind the Berlusconi government, in a front-page comment described the allusion to Berufsverbot as a "profound, intolerable insult". It said that the minister, a university philosopher before he was a politician, did not chose words lightly, speculating it might be part of "an attempt to launch an influential Christian right along American lines".

Acknowledging that Mr Buttiglione's comment on mothers might have been misinterpreted, Stefania Prestigiacomo, the equal opportunities minister, also said it had "no place in heaven or on earth".

His words on homosexuality did win wide support in Italy from Catholics; some noted that he was doing no more than echoing Pope John Paul.

But several leading Catholics distanced themselves from the latest gaffe. Clemente Mastella, a former Berlusconi Christian Democrat minister now leading a small opposition party, said of the multilinguist: "Buttiglione speaks too many languages. If he spoke a little less, he wouldn't say such eccentric and indefensible things."