COLORADO SPRINGS, CO — On Monday, December 17, Focus on the Family founder James Dobson laid the blame for last week’s tragic shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut—which left 20 children and six adults dead—on marriage equality.

“Our country really does seem in complete disarray,” Dobson said. “I mean millions of people have decided that God doesn’t exist, or he’s irrelevant to me and we have killed fifty-four million babies and the institution of marriage is right on the verge of a complete redefinition. Believe me: that is going to have consequences, too.”

Dobson founded Focus on the Family in 1977, and the Family Research Council in 1981. In 2010, the latter organization was certified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Former evangelist and Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee also cited a lack of morality as being responsible for the violent deaths in Newton, calling the massacre a consequence of America having “systematically removed God from our schools.”