This is an opinion column.

Steve Marshall’s gonna make you pay. In more ways than one.

And a new law will help him shield some of those getting paid.

Marshall has convinced Alabama to award a $30,000 contract to a lawyer to “ensure that the Equal Rights Amendment is not illegally added to the U.S, Constitution,” and another $108,000 for a lawyer who specializes in challenging federal actions, which Marshall should be good at by now.

And if you add up the lawyers – and the doctors and psychologists who claim to be experts in gender identity – the Alabama Legislature’s Contract Review Committee over the last two years has awarded up to $2.7 million in contracts to help Marshall defend the state’s anti-trans laws. Some of those contracts were passed last year and renewed this year.

The state has already paid more than $400,000 to those defenders, including $20,000 to Dianna T. Kenny, an Australian critic of transgender politics, and $28,000 to controversial James Cantor, a Canadian sexologist who is a darling of the anti-trans crowd but has been labeled a troll by trans advocates. He quit the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality after being criticized for his views.

Who knows when it will end? The money will pile up, but don’t expect to find out how much more about what “experts” might get paid, thanks to a bill pushed by Marshall this year. The AG – he dares not defend your right to transparency in his government – is now allowed to redact the names of people hired for professional services related to lawsuits. That doesn’t include the lawyers themselves.

We won’t have a right to know who they are. We just pay for them. One way or another.

And on we go.

The Legislature’s Contract Review Committee last week approved contracts worth $975,000 for five lawyers from Washington D.C.’s Cooper & Kirk, as the Alabama Reflector first reported. Another lawyer, Christopher Mills, was granted a $180,000 contract for the same type of work, and has already been paid $91,900 over the last two years.

At the same meeting the panel reapproved contracts to pay one lawyer, Bill Lunsford, up to $14.9 million over the next two years. That’s money we’re spending to defend Alabama’s odious prison system, instead of spending it on fixing prisons. That includes $9.9 million over two years to defend a suit the U.S. Justice Department filed against Alabama for failing to protect inmates from each other and from guards.

Lunsford has already been paid $17.8 million over the last five years, state finance records show, prompting Rep. Chris England to refer to Lunsford as his own “government agency at this point.”

RELATED: Marshall sidelined the prison system’s own lawyers.

Mandy Spiers, a lawyer for the Alabama Department of Corrections, told members of the Contract Review Committee the agency has no choice but to fight the case with outside lawyers picked by the attorney general

“The attorney general’s office has prohibited us from settling this case, multiple times,” she said of the federal government’s case against Alabama.

She also reminded them that Marshall in April stripped the “Deputy AG” designations from ADOC lawyers, so they can no longer represent the system in cases.

“So we are unable to bring any of them in-house,” she said.

Marshall’s office has not responded to questions about the fiscal responsibility of it all. Much less the humanity.

But Rep. England, a member of the Contract Review Committee, said the current contracts are just a fraction of what you will have to pay to defend this admittedly deeply flawed prison system.

“I’m not hung up on $9.9 million. I’m hung up on well over a hundred million dollars over the life of this litigation that’s going to the same …attorney,” England said.

And there’s the thing. We are throwing big money away to defend something any reasonable person would see as wrong. An overcrowded, understaffed prison system rife with death, disease, rape, assault, extortion, assault, drugs and indifference.

England, a lawyer, said it, too.

“There’s not much dispute in terms of liability here, in terms of our issues and overcrowding and conditions and staffing and so forth,” he said. “So a lot of this just continues to drag on and it just ends up costing us a lot more money instead of just trying to figure out a way to work it out.”

We spend huge amounts of money to fight the culture wars, to protect our ability to discriminate, and to ignore our own flaws.

We pay for our sins in millions of ways.

Steve Marshall makes sure of it. Just don’t ask who we paid.

John Archibald is a two-time Pulitzer winner at AL.com.