Rick Santorum may be an emetophiliac….not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of writing another piece for Ecorazzi. I’ve recently started writing freelance for them, and this one was particularly fun because it involved barbs being thrown between two of my very favorite Republicans, Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney. It also gave me a good, unanticipated chuckle to boot.

The tale of how the wildly, profoundly, shockingly disingenuous Romney tied his then-dog, Seamus, to the top of his car during a 12 hour drive to Canada is now being used by Santorum’s campaign to cast aspersions on Romney’s credibility as a prospective Commander-In-Chief. While the genuine care and concern Santorum and his camp have for animals is apparent here and really very touching, the word choice is what stood out to me like a sore thumb.

On CNN, Santorum’s chief advisor John Brabender stated “Quite frankly, I’m not sure I’m going to listen to a value judgement of a guy who strapped his own dog to the top of a car and went hurling down the highway.”

Hurling? Hurling down the highway? Hurling as in barfing? Barfing down the highway? Could it be that you meant to say Hurtling down the highway, Santorum top advisor? It’s not just because I have a healthy interest in barf that I noticed that right away, because the not-overly-interested-in-barf mister noticed it right away, too.

Let me clarify: my interest in vomiting is two-fold. I am 1) obsessed with not vomiting. It’s an awful experience and I have structured my entire adult life so as to avoid it. Having said that, I also 2) very much enjoy a good barf scene in movies and on TV—the chunkier, the better. I loathe a watery, weak vomit scene and have been known to give the screen a piece of my mind when I see one. Maybe it’s because so few of my experiences vomiting in life have involved thin, puny vomit that I find representations like that objectionably unrealistic. Maybe it’s because Tim Roth really set the barf bar high with this scene from Four Rooms. I don’t know. Give me a graphic chunky puke scene or nothing at all.

I digress.

This statement, taken in conjunction with Santorum’s comment last month that the separation of church and state makes him “want to throw up” makes me wonder if he’s not more than a little interested in vomit himself. That just seems like an awful lot of barf-talk for one man. Add to this the widespread sexual duplicity of the Republican party and the recent statistic that purports Republicans have more orgasms than everyone else, and I find myself wondering if Santorum’s not a closet emetophiliac.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

If the consensually shared acidic stench of stomach bile does it for ole Rick, who am I to judge? And as long as he’s sharing the experience with a woman, it’s even in line with the GOP’s mission to uphold and promote the natural sanctity of traditional sex between a man and a woman.

Yeah, just as long as he’s not spewing on another man. That would just be weird.