Anglican rejects call to renounce views on gays

LONDON — Rowan Williams has flatly rejected demands by Anglican evangelicals that he either recant his views on homosexuality and condemn unmarried sex or step down from his post as the next archbishop of Canterbury.

“My personal views are on record, and I have not found reason to change them,” Williams said in a letter, published Wednesday, to  David Banting, chairman of Reform, an influential band of conservative evangelicals within the Church of England.

Reform, whose 1,500 members include more than 500 clergy and a bishop, demanded that Williams affirm publicly the Anglican Church’s traditional teaching that all sex outside marriage is sinful and that church members must “abstain from sexual relations outside holy (heterosexual) matrimony.”

Williams has come under particular fire from Anglican conservatives for his admission that he has ordained a practicing homosexual. In his reply to Banting, the Welsh cleric — who has already been approved as the successor to the Canterbury archbishopric when George Carey steps down at the end of this month — promised only that “I will exercise the discipline of the church as I am bound to do.”