So the British press is all atwitter today about private correspondence between Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and a U.S. theologian in which Williams compares gay relationships to marriage and concludes that both have value before the eyes of God.

But here’s the thing– the letters are from 2000, when Williams was still the archbishop of Wales. That’s 8 YEARS AGO!

Money quote, from The Times of London: “(Williams) argued that scriptural prohibitions were addressed to heterosexuals looking for sexual variety. He wrote: “I concluded that an active sexual relationship between two people of the same sex might therefore reflect the love of God in a way comparable to marriage, if and only if it had about it the same character of absolute covenanted faithfulness.”

When Williams was appointed to head the Church of England and the worldwide Anglican Communion in 2002, he was fairly well known to have left-of-center views on several issues, including homosexuality. But he was never (and still isn’t) a fire-breathing liberal. But against the backdrop of the recent Lambeth Conference in Canterbury, the British media is treating this like some new revelation that will forever alter the course of the Anglican Communion.

The Times’ Ruth Gledhill: “The news threatens to reopenbitter divisions over ordaining gay priests, which pushed the Anglican Communion towards a split.”

Except that it’s not really new. The last graf of Gledhill’s story is probably the most important, and puts the whole thing in perspective: “Lambeth Palace quoted a recent interview in which the Archbishop said: “When I teach as a bishop I teach what the Church teaches. In controverted areas it is my responsibility to teach what the Church has said and why.”