Earlier today, Mark Allen, who is a contributor to the New York Times and National Public Radio, compared Republican presidential candidate Sen. Rick Santorum to Dan White, the man who assassinated Harvey Milk, San Francisco’s first openly gay member of the Board of Supervisors, in 1978.

Allen’s comments reflect a continued trend in Democrat-friendly media to compare Republican candidates to notorious criminals. Recently, for example, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews declared that former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich “looks like a car bomber.”

The reference to Dan White is also apparently Allen’s attempt to lampoon Santorum’s positions on gay issues by painting him as a violent extremist. Santorum has endured vicious criticism from the left for his socially conservative views.