Why not use the best defense
there is, a good offense ?

As a churchman myself, I know a thing or two about the principal opponents to justice and equality for gays – who are only asking for the right to get married in the eyes of the state, not in the eyes of Catholic Bishops or Conservative Protestant preachers. –  And I urge gays and lesbians to remember that the best defense is a good offense.  Friends, I urge you to point out to churchmen who give you a hard time that they should down off their high horses and to get down on their knees and pray for God’s forgiveness, because, when it comes to issues like this, more often than not,

Churchmen have often been
on the wrong side of history.

The sad truth is that the vast majority of the Roman Catholic and the Protestant Churchmen of Germany were on the WRONG side of the mass-murder of our Jewish brothers and sisters.
        Just 60 years ago, in a Christian country very much like ours, where about 90% of the population were either Protestants or Catholics, too few clergymen to deserve mention complained when a Roman Catholic madman named Adolf Hitler enlisted the help of millions of their congregants to do their part in fulfilling Hitler’s dream of exterminating all the Jews of Europe, not to mention the homosexuals and "liberals", that he hated almost as much as the Jews.
        Now I am not suggesting that conditions are as bad for gays here and now as they were for Jews then.  But one of the most important lessons of this tragic period of human history is that church leaders who claimed to speak for God were in fact so devoid of moral or spiritual character that they were unable to recognize the diabolical Nazi regime for what it was, or to warn the faithful to avoid becoming accomplices in the holocaust, which could never have been carried out without MILLIONS of helpers of all kinds.  Hitler didn’t get those helpers from MARS, he got them from the pews of the Christian churches of his own nation.  To give you just one example of the way supposed "men of God" thought in those days, Poland's leading cardinal said: 'There will be the Jewish problem as long as the Jews remain." (which some people at least understood to mean "until the Jews are eliminated".)

The sad truth is that the vast majority of the Roman Catholic and Protestant Churchmen of about half of our own country were on the wrong side of the issue of the `enslavement of our black brothers and sisters.
        In our very own supposedly Christian country, in the 1860's, The Alabama Conference of my own Methodist Church, proclaimed :  "African slavery is a wise, humane and righteous institution approved by God."  The General Assembly of the Southern Presbyterian Church boasted :  "We have no hesitation in affirming that it is the peculiar mission of the southern church to conserve the institution of slavery and to make it a blessing to both master and slave." and the Episcopal Bishop of Savanah, GA condemned opposition to slavery as "presumptuous interference with the will and ways of God."
        While the Roman Catholic Church in the South didn't come out in support of slavery, it was very careful not to oppose it either before or during the war.  As one Catholic writer explained :"
        " By their silence our bishops divorced this burning political question from church affairs. "

The sad truth is that the vast majority of the Roman Catholic and Protestant Churchmen who accompanied the European conquerors of the Americas were partners in their crime against millions of Native Americans.
        We have all been taught that in 1492 our European ancestors "discovered" America.  But the truth is that what our supposedly civilized Christian forebears actually was no more a “discovery” than was Attila the Huns’ invasion of Europe.  It was an invasion of two peace-loving continents every bit as barbaric as any of the invasions of Europe by the barbarians of old, and cost many, many millions of native Americans their lives, their wonderful heritage and everything that had owned and had developed over the course of thousands of years. Before they killed their victims, however, in the name of Jesus Christ and his representatives, the Pope, and the god-appointed rulers of Christian nations, the mass-murderers were required to make this proclamation to their innocent victims:

One of their favorite ways of imposing their idea of "God's plan" on the "savages" they had "discovered" was influenced by their familiarity with the gospel account of "the last supper", i.e.  “In honor, as they said, of Christ our savior and the twelve apostles,” they tied thirteen natives on a long pole between two trees or posts.  When their victims were thus still alive and hanging, the Christians tested their strength and the sharpness of their swords by ripping chests open with one blow and exposing entrails.  Then, straw was wrapped around their victims' torn bodies and they were burned alive.