Years ago, I heard a rumor that my friend Mac Parsons was planning to run for the Alabama Supreme Court, so I called him to ask if it was true.

Parsons was a circuit judge and a former state senator who had gotten drawn out of his legislative district after making too much sense in Montgomery.

He didn't just point out the emperor had no clothes. Goat Hill is a nudist colony, and Mac had the vice squad on speed dial.

And they hated him for it.

"You got all these legislators down there in Montgomery," Parsons told me once. "They put their hand on a Bible and swear to uphold the Alabama Constitution of 1901 and they haven't read either one of those things."

Parsons had read both, cover to cover.

When I called to ask whether he was running for the Supreme Court, he said he was thinking about it. I asked him whether, when elected, he'd put the Ten Commandments on display in the courthouse like Roy Moore had tried.

"Sure, I'll put the commandments on my wall, but ten? There's a lot more than ten commandments in the Bible," he said. "I might not have room for all of them."

Parsons started going through all the rules that most church-going folks breeze past when flipping their Bibles to the parts they liked.

"Did you know that it says in the Bible that it's wrong to eat shellfish?" he said. "I wonder how many people down at the Fish Market know that. Somebody really ought to tell them. It'd be awful if somebody went to hell for eating shrimp."

Mac lost that race, despite having political and financial backing of sitting Republican Supreme Court justices. And not long after, he died of cancer. And those of us who loved him were left to feel sad twice.

Years later, I still feel the tug of that telephone. Not a week goes by I don't wish I could call to shoot the breeze about Alabama politics.

But especially this week, I'd like to hear what he'd have to say about his old colleague, state Sen. Gerald Dial, and Dial's proposed constitutional amendment to decorate public buildings with the Ten Commandments.

Earlier this spring, the Alabama Legislature passed Dial's amendment, and this week the Alabama Secretary of State scheduled that amendment to appear on the November ballot:

"Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of Alabama of 1901, providing for certain religious rights and liberties; authorizing the display of the Ten Commandments on state property and property owned or administrated by a public school or public body; and prohibiting the expenditure of public funds in defense of the constitutionality of this amendment."

Did you catch that last part?

This amendment, this bold stand for religious liberty or whatever -- it actually prohibits the state government from spending money on the thing it's supposed to defend.

So what good is it for?

According to Dial, it's to prevent school shootings.

"I believe that if you had the Ten Commandments posted in a prominent place in school, it has the possibility to prohibit some student from taking action to kill other students," Dial said.

Instead of granite, like Roy Moore's old washing machine-sized monument, maybe schools could make the Ten Commandments out of kevlar, so when some nut walks through the door the students could use them as bullet proof vests.

Or maybe this is just another ploy for votes -- for Dial, who's running for Agriculture Commissioner, and for the Alabama GOP, whose members have broken every commandment they've written into the ethics laws.

It's there to drive turn-out, and nothing else.

It's nakedly political. Nakedly partisan. Naked nonsense.

Mac, I'm sure, would have something funny to say. Something dry. Something witty. Something that would cut through all Dial's BS and expose him and the Montgomery lawmakers who put this thing on the ballot. Something that would make me feel better about all this stupidity.

But he doesn't answer the phone anymore. And I'm left again to feel sad twice.

Kyle Whitmire is the state political columnist for the Alabama Media Group.

Want access to the best analysis and in-depth reporting about Alabama each week? Sign up for the weekly Reckon Report newsletter and follow Reckon on Facebook and Twitter.