Don’t tell me the rhetoric on the right isn’t part of what happened in Colorado Springs last week.

Don’t tell me, either, that the poor man was a victim of untreated mental illness.

Three innocent people are dead at a Planned Parenthood clinic because the screamers on the far right have whipped up a frenzy of hatred against women’s rights to control their own bodies, and this man apparently responded to that, so desperate to stop the “murder” that he took a gun and killed three people.

Had he been black or Arabic, he would have been labeled a thug or a terrorist and shot dead on the scene. But he was white, so he is labeled as someone with a mental illness and taken alive, unscathed.

Two of the dead were men, not people who would have abortions. The third was a young mother.

I am well beyond the age of childbearing, but I am grateful to have spent most of my childbearing years in a time when choices were available to me. I made my choice both times I became pregnant, and my choice, both times, was to bear the child.

But I am a staunch defender of a woman’s right to choose. I volunteer to escort patients into the clinic at my local Planned Parenthood. I don’t ask why they’re there; I just walk them in, talking to them to distract them from the screaming haters at the edge of the property. No woman should be forced to bear a child she can’t care for, no matter what her reason for deciding she can’t care for the child. If you want a child, have one; if you don’t, don’t.

But to spread hate-filled rhetoric and then claim the person who responded to it is mentally ill is hypocritical at best.

I spent Saturday arguing with people who believe Planned Parenthood sells baby parts, even though that assertion has been proven false. One told me the incontrovertible proof was right there on YouTube. I answered that the videos had been edited to appear damning, and that the person who did it has admitted that, but she insisted the videos were accurate. I finally told her she needed to take Abraham Lincoln’s advice and not believe everything she sees on the Internet.

The man who opened fire at the Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs (and I won’t name him), killing two men and a woman, is a terrorist, not a poor, pitiable man who couldn’t get help for his mental illness. I’m not saying he doesn’t have a mental illness; I think terrorism is a mental illness. Healthy people don’t do these things. Perhaps if treatment had been available to him, his illness might have been managed, but it wasn’t. That doesn’t mean he isn’t a terrorist — someone who tries to get people to live the way he wants them to using fear and violence.

He is no different than the violent Muslim. Both are filled with rage against people who won’t live by their beliefs. Both believe they’re doing God’s work by killing nonbelievers.

Although law enforcement is still saying the motive is unclear, his former wife said he is religious, conservative and anti-abortion. Had he been Muslim, he would have been decried as someone who wanted Sharia Law; instead, as a Christian who wants people to live by his belief that every sperm is sacred, he’s taken alive and called mentally ill.

I feel a little less safe now when I go to volunteer at Planned Parenthood, but I believe the people who use this clinic as their primary source of health care deserve to feel safe and protected as they get out of their cars and walk across the parking lot. Most of them are not there for an abortion, but as I said, I’m not there to ask why they came.