Michigan Attorney General (Finally) Shows Anti-Gay Assistant the Door

After months of launching outrageous and obscene accusations against gay University of Michigan student body president Chris Armstrong, Michigan Assistant Attorney General Andrew Shirvell has lost his job.

Michigan's Attorney General Mike Cox handed down his decision to fire Shirvell this week. Cox says Shirvell was fired for conduct unbecoming a public official and for “borderline stalking behavior.”

Shirvell, a University of Michigan alumnus, had operated a blog in which he regularly posted diatribes against 21-year-old Armstrong. Among the accusations were tales of campus orgies and inappropriate relationships between Armstrong and his straight peers. Armstrong eventually won a protective order barring Shirvell from stalking him after the assistant attorney general continued to show up on campus and at Armstrong’s home.

Several other reasons for Shirvell’s termination were cited by Cox. According to The Detroit Free Press, Cox found that Shirvell had:

• Showed up at the home of a private citizen three times, including once at 1:30 a.m. That incident is especially telling because it clearly was about harassing Armstrong, not engaging in free speech.
• Further engaged in behavior that, while not perhaps sufficient to charge criminal stalking, was harassing, uninvited and showed a pattern that was in the everyday sense, stalking;
• Harassing Armstrong's friends as they were socializing in Ann Arbor;
• Numerous calls to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office, Armstrong's employer, in an attempt to slander Armstrong—and ultimately attempting to cause Pelosi to fire Armstrong;
• Attempting to "out" Armstrong's friends as homosexual—several of whom were not gay.

Cox, who originally defended Shirvell’s free speech rights, also says Shirvell lied during disciplinary investigations.

Philip Thomas, Shirvell's attorney, has vowed to fight the termination and says his client is the victim of “liberal media.”

“This smells political to me,” Thomas told the Detroit paper. “There’s been a tremendous piling on against Andrew. The liberal media started this tempest in a teapot.”

The paper’s readers aren’t buying Shirvell’s free speech argument.

“I find it hard to believe that our Founding Fathers, when bringing forward the right of freedom of speech, imagined that people would hide behind that right to maliciously attack others based on opinion, not fact,” one reader wrote in a letter to the editor.

Another adds:

No, they can't fire him for an opinion, vile as it may be, but Shirvell's blog went beyond opinion and lied about Armstrong's past. Add that to the bullying and stalking and this should have been a no-brainer for Cox from the second this story came out.

The recent rash of bullying of gay kids has led to the phrase "it gets better." That phrase is true in one way: Andrew Shirvell no longer represents the State of Michigan.

And, newspaper readers aren’t the only one defending the firing. CNN’s legal analyst, Jeffrey Toobin, told Anderson Cooper on Nov. 8 that free speech rights don’t necessarily stop employers from terminating an employee.

“The notion that if you simply use words, you are protected by the First Amendment is just a myth,” Toobin said. “Lots of things can get you fired that are just words.”

Ed Brayton, a writer for MichiganMessenger.com, initially disagreed with sentiments such as Toobin’s. He made three predictions after news of Shirvell’s firing was released:

1. He’s going to file a suit against the state for wrongful termination.
2. He’ll be represented by the Thomas More Law Center in that suit.
3. He will win that suit. He’s got pretty solid grounds for a First Amendment suit here and I think it’s likely a winning case, no matter how vile I find his comments to be.

Brayton later said the case against Shirvell seems “far stronger,” writing: “The things he said about Armstrong on his blog are undoubtedly protected by the First Amendment, but that doesn’t mean he can engage in them while working in the AG’s office. And the repeated phone calls to Armstrong’s boss clearly suggests harassment far more than mere free speech.”

Armstrong’s attorney, Deborah Gordon, says other clients might launch their own complaints against Shirvell and that she’ll attempt to have Shirvell’s legal license revoked.

Matt Comer is a staff writer for Campus Progress.

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