Leadership Quote by Rocco Buttiglione

A politician’s compliment is rarely just a compliment. Buttiglione’s line wraps a normative agenda in the calm language of social necessity: the family isn’t defended because it’s sacred or sentimental, but because it “functions.” That word does heavy lifting. It frames family not as a private choice but as civic infrastructure, the kind of institution the state can justify supporting, protecting, and, quietly, policing.

The intent is strategic moderation. By casting the family as a “social function,” Buttiglione sidesteps culture-war vocabulary while still arriving at a familiar destination: the family “should be sustained.” “Should” is the hinge between description and prescription, smuggling moral direction into what sounds like a pragmatic observation. The subtext is that alternative arrangements are, at best, less functional and, at worst, socially costly. It’s an argument that invites policy: tax benefits, education standards, welfare design, adoption rules, marriage law. Support becomes a lever.

Context matters because Buttiglione is a Catholic-influenced Italian conservative who has operated in a Europe where demographics, secularization, and LGBTQ rights have been flashpoints. In the early 2000s especially, “family” served as a proxy term in debates over same-sex unions, gender roles, and the boundaries of liberal tolerance. Saying “social function” aims to sound modern and empirical, but it’s also a bid to naturalize a particular model of kinship as the default solution to social disorder.

It works rhetorically because it makes dissent feel antisocial: if the family is a public good, opposing its “sustaining” reads like opposing stability itself. The elegance is that it invites agreement before the listener notices what, exactly, they’ve agreed to.