The murder of Cerina Fairfax is inexcusable, but the calculated political destruction of Justin Fairfax deserves both scrutiny and culpability.

by Shaun Kenney

The past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose providence dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations. The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always.”

— Greg Iles, “The Quiet Game” (1999)

One never truly knows the weight each of us might be carrying. What we can say is that no one has the unmitigated right to load that weight on others.

Justin Fairfax — a former lieutenant governor of the Commonwealth — was carrying a great weight indeed. Having been nearly a breath away from becoming governor himself after the Northam scandal involving blackface and a Ku Klux Klan hood, Fairfax found himself the target of a vicious and personal character assassination at the hands of McAuliffe’s public relations goons only for then-Democratic Attorney General Mark Herring to have been caught in his own blackface scandal. Northam was rehabilitated and even had the testicular fortitude to endorse Democratic candidates and have his endorsement welcomed in turn.

Fairfax managed to survive his term as lieutenant governor only to find that he was unemployable — the dark cloud of allegations being disproven one by one to an audience that didn’t give a damn. Fairfax’s political career was destroyed, his personal career was destroyed, his reputation was destroyed, and his self-worth was destroyed before consuming his marriage as well.

What Fairfax did to his wife was reprehensible in the extreme. There are no excuses or justification for murder. What Fairfax unloaded on others — his family, friends, and associates — is the same scar left behind in every suicide.

I have ruminated on this for several days now, with several conversations with others asking what I thought, who was to blame, and so forth. I hesitated to write anything at all for fear of being sucked in to the vortex of recrimination and misunderstanding. Yet in the hopes that maybe by sharing my own thoughts we could help knock off the rougher edges of the world and make it gentler, here they are:

Political life carries sacrifices

Writing about third rails is always a landmine, because especially in politics, it is so much easier to misunderstand for political gain than it is to understand. What Fairfax did to his wife Cerina was unpardonable. Two people were murdered by Justin Fairfax — his wife and himself. This requires no embellishment.

C.S. Lewis writes of the false virtue of unselfishness that pervades modern society, and I think it is worth reflecting upon them in full:

If you asked twenty good men today what they thought of the highest of the virtues, nineteen of them would reply, Unselfishness. But if you had asked almost any of the great Christians of old, he would have replied, Love.

Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

— C.S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory” (1942)

At the very same time, Lewis is writing his old friend J.R.R. Tolkien a series of vignettes entitled The Screwtape Letters. In it, Lewis takes up the false virtue of unselfishness as the source of so much conflict:

If each side had been frankly contending for its own real wish, they would have all kept within the bounds of reason and courtesy; but just because the contention is reversed and each side is fighting the other side’s battle, all the bitterness which really flows from thwarted self-righteousness and obstinacy and the accumulated grudges of the last ten years is concealed from them by the nominal or official ‘Unselfishness’ of what they are doing or, at least, held to be excused by it.

As most who are involved in politics will confide, being involved in politics requires a great deal of sacrifice. My own personal speech to most aspiring elected officials is simple: politics, career, family — choose two. Which is a very short way of saying that if one of these three isn’t very neatly squared away, then you will end up sacrificing one or the other. For most, that’s politics — there is almost always someone else who believes what you believe and is willing to fight the good fight. For some, that’s career — and politics becomes your career and well, you don’t need much more imagining as to what happens next.

For too many, it is family that goes on the chopping block.

Missed recitals, missed baseball games, bringing the kids to events, one parent taking on the duties and responsibilities of Penelope while the other becomes Odysseus. For so many of us, we unselfishly give over.

The reprehensible political destruction of Justin Fairfax

Now none of us — not a single one of us — have the right to weigh the scales in the case of Justin and Cerina Fairfax.

I have no particular insight to their marriage much less to his political campaign. My conversations with Justin were perfunctory and about as brief as one might consider them to be between a Democrat and Republican nowadays.

Yet what I do know is that I wrote extensively of the Northam blackface scandal at the time and was personally appalled at the treatment meted out to Justin Fairfax — a man the Byrd Machine did everything in their power to prevent even being on the ticket in 2017 — by the McAuliffe/Northam crisis management team. They didn’t just set out to keep Fairfax from becoming governor, but sought to destroy the man politically, professionally, and personally with unsubstantiated allegations which dragged on for years.

Why? Lawfare — and everyone with a soul knows it. Lawfare — to keep a black man out of real power. Lawfare designed to destroy a man so as to send a message to others. Too many people played along in the media and elsewhere, and the useful idiots who love to be quoted could be relied upon to play their role.

No small wonder why Fairfax could not find meaningful employment after his term as lieutenant governor. His own party made damn sure he was radioactive. The gut-wrenching results of the campaign to destroy him only now bore fruit, because this is how it works. Fall in line — or fall like Fairfax.

Let the record be clear. Fairfax didn’t deserve it and more voices should have been raised against what Northam’s handlers did.

The question that will always matter: Am I my brother’s keeper?

Some mention should be made about mental health, again without excusing Justin Fairfax’s culpability. For those of us who say the mea culpa every Sunday — “through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault” — the Latin culpa encompasses the meaning of several words: fault, guilt, blame.

There is most certainly a stigma among men to admit depression much less the option for suicide. Among black men, the stigma is ten times more omnipresent. Such feelings only deepen the well, where not only can one not handle the world but now you cannot handle yourself? Red flags. John Milton’s Paradise Lost describes such a hell:

A Dungeon horrible, on all sides round
As one great Furnace flam’d, yet from those flames
No light, but rather darkness visible
Serv’d onely to discover sights of woe,
Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace
And rest can never dwell, hope never comes
That comes to all; but torture without end.

For someone to raise one’s hand in a world where unselfishness is the highest of the virtues, a cri de’coeur is an imposition. Or that worst of secular sins: selfishness.

Red flag.
No light.
Just darkness visible.

St. Thomas Aquinas defines love as willing the good of another, which is quite a different thing than unselfishness.

Love can be unselfish, but unselfishness is by no means love. C.S. Lewis defines unselfishness in The Screwtape Letters as a negation, simply not giving trouble to others. As such, if one views love as merely unselfishness, then one may well commit other mistakes, as the devil Screwtape explains:

If. . . you have made him believe that ‘Love’ is both irresistible and somehow intrinsically meritorious, [it] is an incomparable recipe for prolonged, ‘noble’, romantic, tragic adulteries, ending, if all goes well, in murders and suicides.

What is an adultery? One might think it is the avocation of far too many denizens of Virginia’s Capitol Square — toss a stone in the air and you are sure to hit someone guilty. Yet if the etymology of the word gets us anywhere, it is the Latin adultere — which much like adulterating a fine whiskey or scotch, it is to take something special and make it less so — to corrupt, to pollute, to make weaker, to falsify, something counterfeit to the actual thing, or worse to deny the true sense of a thing.

In this, there is far too much that is special in this world that politics and politicians do their worst to adulterate and use up what’s special. Sure we support them, wish them well, and watch them stagger.

In this, the modern mantra of “support” simply doesn’t do the trick. We aren’t called to support one another; we are called to love one another and in the Christian tradition to love one another as Christ loves us. We are not individuals who need therapy to learn how to deal with a cruel world, but persons with souls who interact with the world through our friends, family, and relations. We are not means to an end to be manipulated and used to get what we want, but rather each of us are ends unto ourselves.

It is good that we exist — so good in fact that God decided this whole thing we call Creation would not have been perfect unless each one of us existed right now at this place and at this time.

Now not everyone thinks existing is a prima face good. We are itty-bitty specks latched on a mote of dust floating around a sunbeam among 400 billion other stars among 2 trillion other galaxies in the universe. The universe doesn’t give a damn about the suffering of the world, but the Creator of this universe who put us here to experience all this cool stuff cared so much for us that he stretched out His arms and died for this moment.

And yes there is suffering in the world, and as imperfect creatures we bring a lot of that suffering into the world: how we treat one another, how we speak to one another, how we use one another, how we pursue our wants rather than order our desires to a higher good. Yet the right answer to the question of suffering isn’t where is God, but rather where is mankind? Where are we? Where are you and I? At the end of the Book of Job, it isn’t God who ends suffering — but mankind.

The Fairfax family deserved better — from all of us.

So yes — it is good that you exist. Too many of us are carrying loads our shoulders cannot carry, whether it is because we take it on — or pile it on.

Love concerns oneself with the good of others, and while I refuse to speculate on the Fairfax family, one should add at least this — the Fairfax children should be surrounded with love, more love, and the very limits of love. What has happened is now a lesson. What should happen next is up to each one of us in our capacity to do what is needed and best for the Fairfax family — particularly the children.

Yet for those of us in the political world, a few observations are worth bearing in mind:

Not every win is a victory. The manner by which you win is just as important as winning itself. No one deserves to be destroyed for political gain. Lawfare and those who engage in it is a despicable act. Justin Fairfax was a victim of lawfare and everyone knew it — and for that, Virginia’s cognoscenti should take their share of the adulteration. Cerena Fairfax deserved better. Cerina’s children deserved better.

Justin Fairfax deserved better.

Like others, one finds it difficult to reconcile Justin’s mental health with the violent murder of his own wife at his own hands. Those who are speculating are doing the family and the children zero favors. Yet instinctively, I suspect it is better to talk about such things rather than allow the conversation (sic) to remain in the hands of the brazen political opportunists who pretend to care.

More than this, we should perhaps all remember that politics is not immune from consequences to either family or career. Disagreement should not be the reason we destroy people — ever. Even if it is hard, disagreement is never the reason to destroy people. If there is some risk in saying this, then I will gladly take it even at the risk of being misunderstood. We deserve what we tolerate, and those who demonize in order to disagree are perhaps the demons themselves. We could use a lot less of that.

Take a moment to take stock of those who are going through a rough time and ask whether our own motives are out of an unselfishness or of a willing for their own good. Is it a question of duty or a question of love? Are we treating people as individuals or as persons? Are we piling on people or are we piling on the problems that are hurting people?

In the sense that we are adulterating what we owe to others by substituting individuals for persons, performance for worship, unselfishness for charity, and duty for love — how indeed are we failing our brothers and sisters?

We certainly failed the Fairfax family.

Now I am not certain that there is a Republican or Democratic answer to these and many other questions, but I highly suspect there is a right one and many excuses not to find the right one.

Good people are depending on the answer every single day.

The National Suicide Prevention Hotline can be reached by dialing 988. The National Domestic Violence Prevention Hotline can be reached by dialing 800.799.7233. For depression, call 988 as well. Both hotlines are private and confidential.

If you are ever in a condition where you or a loved one is in absolute and immediate danger, call 911 or visit the nearest emergency room.

If you or someone you may know wants to talk, you are free to respond to this article by replying to it directly and providing a means of getting in touch (your phone number). Our conversation will be personal, confidential, and entirely off record — doesn’t matter your political affiliation, title, if we actually know one another, or anything else.

Shaun Kenney is editor for The Republican Standard. This column has been republished with permission from The Republican Standard.