21 APRIL 2007, Page 24

No sex outside marriage

Sir: I fear Rod Liddle (‘The C of E must make up its mind’, 14 April) is a little behind the times. The Church of England has already ‘made up its mind’ about homosexuality — indeed, it has never changed it. As it affirmed at the last Lambeth Conference in 1998, homosexual practice, like other forms of sex outside marriage, are ‘incompatible with Scripture’. To label orthodox Church teaching ‘primitive’, ‘narrow-minded’ and the refuge of ‘bigots’ suggests that Mr Liddle has been rather more influenced by Richard Dawkins’s secular fundamentalism than he might care to acknowledge.

Mark S. Smith Colchester, Essex