Leadership Quote by Rocco Buttiglione

Buttiglione’s sentence is a master class in political self-insurance: it performs tolerance while ring-fencing moral condemnation as a private entitlement. The opening clause, “I support non-discrimination,” plants him on the safe side of liberal-democratic norms. Then the real payload arrives: “but I think… I have the right to think,” a recursive legalistic loop that shifts the argument from what he believes to whether anyone is allowed to object to him believing it. The repetition isn’t clumsiness; it’s strategy. He’s laundering a contested moral claim through the more broadly palatable language of rights and free conscience.

The parenthetical dodge - “without saying whether I think it or not” - is the tell. He is saying it while trying to avoid the consequences of saying it. That move positions critics as censors, not as citizens evaluating whether a public official’s moral framework affects policy and governance. In other words: don’t judge my fitness for office; judge your own commitment to pluralism.

Invoking “the catechism of the Catholic Church” does double work. It borrows institutional authority (this isn’t just my prejudice, it’s doctrine) and recasts the belief as inherited, almost passive. Yet “morally wrong” is not a neutral theological footnote; it’s a value judgment with social force, especially coming from a policymaker whose decisions can shape family law, education, and civil rights.

Context matters: Buttiglione became emblematic in European debates about whether personal religious convictions are compatible with roles overseeing equality policy. The subtext isn’t simply “I disapprove.” It’s “You must tolerate my disapproval as the price of tolerating difference,” even when that disapproval targets a minority’s legitimacy.