As the nation reeled from reports of the horrifying mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., most Americans responded with an outpouring of sympathy.
However, Bryan Fischer made some notably controversial comments in the wake of the tragedy.
The conservative Christian who has continuously drawn the ire of groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center and GLAAD for his anti-gay rhetoric and vitriolic tirades on behalf of the American Family Association, said on his radio show that God did not protect the victims of the Connecticut shooting because prayer has been prohibited from the public school system:
The question is going to come up, where was God? I though God cared about the little children. God protects the little children. Where was God when all this went down. Here's the bottom line, God is not going to go where he is not wanted.
Now we have spent since 1962 -- we're 50 years into this now--we have spent 50 years telling God to get lost, telling God we do not want you in our schools, we don't want to pray to you in our schools, we do not want to pray to your before football games, we don't want to pray to you at graduations, we don't want anybody talking about you in a graduation speech...
In 1962 we kicked prayer out of the schools. In 1963 we kicked God's word out of ours schools. In 1980 we kicked the Ten Commandments out of our schools. We've kicked God out of our public school system. And I think God would say to us, 'Hey, I'll be glad to protect your children, but you've got to invite me back into your world first. I'm not going to go where I'm not wanted. I am a gentlemen.
"The ultimate solution here is not the Second Amendment, but the First Amendment," Fisher continued. "Maybe it's time for some school board and administrators to say, we don't care, the lives of our children are just too important to us. We are going to pray in our schools, at the beginning of the day, we are going to pray for protection."
Fischer's comments are his latest attempt to politicize a senseless tragedy.
In November, Fischer said that terrorists who attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001 were "the agents of God’s wrath” because they prompted “God Bless America” to be sung at Major League Baseball games, which is one “one of the reasons we haven’t been hit since 9/11," Raw Story notes. He has also said that gun rights are based on God's teachings, that being gay may be a "birth defect" and that the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" repeal will increase pedophilia.
However, Fischer is not the only one to make controversial comments regarding the Sandy Hook shooting.
Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee made similar remarks on Friday.
"We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools," Huckabee said on Fox News. "Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?"