ROME (AFP) - Italy's disputed nominee for the EU justice and security commissioner's post denied having made new comments denigrating the role of women and said he was being victimized by the media.
Rocco Buttiglione was forced to hit back after Italian newspapers reported him as saying that single mothers who brought up children alone were "not very good".
"Children who don't have a father but only a mother, are children of a mother who is not very good," Buttiglione was quoted as telling a convention in northern Italy on Friday evening.
Buttiglione, minister for European Affairs in Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's government, denied he ever disparaged single mothers and said his comments had been taken out of context by malicious journalists.
"I give my full support to those who courageously bring up their children," he said, as criticism rained down on him from Italian opposition parties and civil liberties groups over the reported comments.
Buttiglione said he had been speaking about the relationship between the United States and Europe, borrowing an analogy first put forward by an American professor saying Europe was the daughter of Venus and the United States the product of Mars.
In that context, "I said it would be better if Europe and the United States understood each other and consequently, that children had a mother and a father."
Buttligione, a conservative Catholic, has already enraged some Euro MPs by describing homosexuality as a "sin" and saying a woman's place was to have children and be protected by her husband.
This week a parliamentary civil liberties committee narrowly voted to reject him as Italy's candidate for the EU Commission, forcing incoming Commission president Jose Manuel Durao Barroso to issue a statement backing him.
However, his latest remarks were greeted with incredulity by cabinet colleague Stefania Prestigiacomo, Italy's minister for equal opportunities.
"To me it seems really impossible that he would have said such a thing," she told the Corriere della Sera newspaper.
The Italian gay-rights movement Arcigay accused Buttiglione of being "a prophet for a new medieval era" on the issues of sexual and family morality.
"At this point we can only hope that the European parliament block Barroso's commission if Buttiglione is confirmed as candidate for justice, and therefore for rights," said its leader Sergio Lo Giudice.
It said that despite his comments to the contrary, Buttiglione had "no intention of separating his religious beliefs from his political actions, as he has sought to have Italians believe," he said.
In Germany, the head of parliament's family affairs committee Kerstin Griese, told Sunday's Tagesspiegel newspaper: "It's shameful that he wants us to believe that women who bring up children alone are not real parents".
Claudia Roth of the Green Party said Buttiglione was "absolutely inappropriate choice to represent, as commissioner for interior affairs and security, the values enshrined in the fundamental charter (of human rights) and in the EU Constitution."
However Germany's representative on the Commission, Guenter Verheugen, defended Buttiglione.
"In Europe everyone has the right to have his opinion and to live his life according to certain values," said Verheugen, who is to take over the industry portfolio, told the German magazine Der Spiegel in an interview to be published Monday.
"I have absolutely nothing against that."