The tragedy that left Rob Reiner and his wife Michele dead, apparently at the hands of their troubled son, is a loss not only for those who knew the Reiners personally but also for our country.
Rob Reiner was exceptionally talented and creative as an actor, director and producer.
In his groundbreaking role as Meathead in “All in the Family,” Reiner would spar with his conservative father-in-law Archie Bunker. But it was clear that they loved each other in spite of their political differences.
As a producer and director, Reiner created characters and movies that people watch over and over again because they are full of heart and humanity.
Reiner was also an engaged progressive activist. He voiced his opinions and acted on his convictions, and he encouraged others to do the same.
I met him through People For the American Way’s founder Norman Lear, who Reiner often described as his second father. When I was getting ready to meet Reiner for the first time, Lear told me, “Don’t worry, he’ll hold up your end of the conversation.”
That was said with deep love and appreciation for the energy and passion Reiner brought to everything. Lear described this quality in his 2014 book “Even This I Get to Experience.” He wrote, “To be alone with Rob Reiner is to be in a crowd. His brain and his mouth, like a chain of Chinese firecrackers, are firing constantly.”
“What was great about Rob,” Lear wrote, “was that the person, the actor, the director, the friend, the participant, the activist, the star, the husband, and the father all came from the center of his being.”
The energy that radiated from the center of Reiner’s being touched many lives.
Rob and Michele were longtime advocates for the equality of lesbian, gay and transgender people. They helped create the American Foundation for Equal Rights, which funded the successful challenge to California’s 2008 same-sex marriage ban.
In 2015, Rob wrote about how heartened he was by younger generations’ support for marriage equality, adding, “I think it’s going to be the same with the transgender community. It’s going to get us closer and closer to the ideal that we are all one.”
That ideal has been brutally tested by the Trump presidency. Reiner was convinced that too many people were underestimating the threat Trump posed to democracy. He took part in protests calling for impeachment and supported organizations working to hold Trump accountable.
Reiner was also concerned about the threat to Americans’ freedom from authoritarian Christian nationalism, the topic of a 2024 documentary he produced.
Experts interviewed in “God and Country” included quite a few Christian religious leaders, authors and scholars, some of them conservatives, who are also alarmed by the rise of the dangerous political ideology of white Christian nationalism.
Reiner absolutely had the courage of his convictions. He was not someone who engaged in a lot of both sides-ism. But he never let his politics devour his humanity.
Outspoken conservative actor James Woods told Fox News viewers that Reiner was a “great patriot” who loved his country and respected Woods’s patriotism even though they disagreed about how that patriotism should be enacted.
When right-wing activist Charlie Kirk was murdered, Reiner denounced political violence, calling it a horror that no one should have to face. After Kirk’s memorial service, Reiner praised his widow Erika for demonstrating grace in extending forgiveness to her husband’s killer.
If only President Trump could have mustered a modicum of that grace about the Reiners’ murder.
Instead, he unleashed a truly nasty rant blaming their deaths on what he called Reiner’s “incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.” When offered a chance to step back and act like a decent human being, Trump stubbornly dug in.
Many of us have become somewhat numbed to Trump’s cruelty and narcissism, but his attacks on Reiner were so repulsive and so lacking in basic human empathy that they drew sharp condemnation even from Republican elected officials and conservative media figures.
In contrast to Trump, Reiner and Lear reminded us that you can be fervent in your beliefs without demonizing those who disagree with you.
There’s another lesson we can take from the two of them. If you care deeply about something, you can do something about it.
When Lear died a couple of years ago, Reiner said that he had shown him how to use his public platform to advocate for things that are important to him.
He never stopped. And neither should we.
