AMERICAN FAMILY - Married to ISIS

"Her husband was an ISIS sniper, her son appeared in propaganda.  What’s next for this American family?" PBS NewsHour 4/11/2018

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  What should the U.S. government do with American citizens who traveled to live among the Islamic State?  Sam El Hassani is an American woman who is being held with her children by Kurdish forces in northern Syria after living in Raqqa with her husband, who was an ISIS sniper.  Special correspondent and filmmaker Josh Baker reports in partnership with Frontline and the BBC.

"Most Americans who joined ISIS don’t come back.  What happens to the rest?" PBS NewsHour 4/12/2018

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  The El Hassani family, now being held in Northern Syria by Kurdish forces, are not the only Americans who went to land controlled by the Islamic State -- there are dozens known to have ventured to the so-called caliphate since 2014.  What should happen to those families and their children now?  Amna Nawaz explores the dilemma with Seamus Hughes of George Washington University.

NEWSHOUR BOOKSHELF - "The Heart Is a Shifting Sea"

"In ‘The Heart Is a Shifting Sea,’ Indian couples navigate domestic squalls and rapid change" PBS NewsHour 2/7/2018

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  “The Heart is a Shifting Sea” is a story of modern love told through the eyes of three Indian couples in Mumbai.  The NewsHour’s Elizabeth Flock spent years following how these men and women navigate marriage and relationships at a moment when tradition is colliding with 21st century global culture.  Flock joins Jeffrey Brown to discuss what she learned.

NEWSHOUR'S IMHO - Dani Shapiro on Marriage

"Marriage is a dance of growing together, apart, together" PBS NewsHour 11/1/3017

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  What does it take to walk alongside another human being over time?  Writer Dani Shapiro set out to explore the beauty and the troubles of enduring love.  Shining a light on her and her husband's life course together, Shapiro offers her humble opinion on keeping the flame alive.

WOMEN - Forced Marriage, the Marriage of Kings

"Uncovering the problem of forced marriage in the U.S." PBS NewsHour 9/14/2016

aka "The downside of conservative, male chauvinist, religion."

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  She was never verbally or physically threatened or restrained.  But at age 19, Nina Van Harn felt like she couldn't say no when she was expected to marry a man chosen by her family.  And she is not alone in her experience.  In a two-year period, it's estimated that there were 3,000 such forced marriage cases in the United States.  Special correspondent Gayle Tzemach Lemmon reports.

GAYLE TZEMACH LEMMON, special correspondent :  For Nina Van Harn, raising her children today is a radical departure from her own upbringing.

NINA VAN HARN, Married at 19:  My childhood was part magical, and part complicated.

GAYLE TZEMACH LEMMON:  She was raised in rural Michigan on a 40-acre farm in a tight-knit community that practiced a conservative form of evangelical Christianity.  Its members largely kept to themselves, more “Little House on the Prairie” than modern-day America.

Growing up, she always knew one day was coming.  She recorded its arrival in her diary.

NINA VAN HARN:  “Dear Kit (ph)” — that was the name of the girl in the journal — “You will never guess what happened today.  This morning after breakfast, papa sat Naomi (ph) and I down at the kitchen table and nailed us both with a load of bricks.  He believes he found husbands for both of us.”

GAYLE TZEMACH LEMMON:  Van Harn had turned 19.  She was legally an adult.  There was no gun to her head, no chains around her wrists.  But because of lifelong pressures from her family and her upbringing, she considers herself one of thousands of American women and girls forced into marriage each year.

NINA VAN HARN:  I knew that I wasn't going to say no.  This was God's will.  God had spoken.  And it was just not even an option.  I didn't think consciously in my head 'I'm being forced.'

WAR ON ISIS - Islamic Teenage Brides

"What motivated these teenage girls to become Islamic State brides?" PBS NewsHour 8/17/2015

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  In London, three seemingly normal and high-achieving teenage girls recently left their homes to join the Islamic State terrorist group in Syria, leaving their families to grapple for answers.  Their story is the subject of a new multimedia report by The New York Times.  Judy Woodruff talks to New York Times video journalist Mona El-Naggar and Steven Simon of Dartmouth College.

JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour):  Last week on the program, we heard about the Islamic State’s practice of institutionalized sexual slavery of non-Muslim women.

Tonight, we focus on another New York Times report about three seemingly normal and high-performing teenage girls who willingly left their homes in Great Britain to join the terrorist group.

We begin with a video excerpt that shows the family of one of the girls grappling for answers.

WOMAN:  This is Kadiza’s room.  Very neat and tidy.  She is very organized.  But she wasn’t sleeping here on the night that she left.

NARRATOR:  This was Kadiza Sultana’s home in London before she left to join ISIS.  Her sister has been devastated ever since Kadiza disappeared.

WOMAN:  The yellow jumper, that is her.  So, she selected all these to put in — we went to Bangladesh.  That was in 2009.

WOMAN:  How did she get the money?

WOMAN:  We asked the question.  We asked it of the police, and they haven’t got it for us, really.

NARRATOR:  Kadiza was 16 and a straight-A student at this school.  One morning, she told her mother she was leaving to study.  But she never returned.  The next time the family saw Kadiza was on the news.

WOMAN:  International hunt for three young girls believed to be on their way to join ISIS.

MAN:  At Gatwick, they boarded a Turkish Airlines plane for Istanbul.

WOMAN:  Police are out in Turkey trying to find them.

NARRATOR:  The girls weren’t even old enough to drive, but they traveled thousands of miles to Syria and handed themselves over to ISIS.

AMERICA - Marriage and Divorce Rates

"Census Data Reveals New Geography of Marriage for Americans" PBS Newshour 8/29/2011

Excerpt

RAY SUAREZ (Newshour): Among the newly-released studies is a first-of-its-kind Census Bureau analysis of marriage and divorce rates by region. The report, published last week, found that the South and West had the highest rates of divorce, while the Northeast ranked the lowest of the four regions.

At the same time, the number of unmarried Americans has reached a historic high, as the census also found that 30 percent of Americans have never been married, the largest percentage in the past 60 years. And yet another census snapshot released by the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that same-sex couples have dispersed from urban enclaves to other parts of the country.

REPORT PDF: Marital Events of Americans: 2009 (Issued 8/2011)



Another excerpt

DAVID BLANKENHORN, Institute for American Values: I think the shift in broad terms is toward -- for marriage as an institution to marriage as a private relationship, an option for a private relationship. You know, in our parents and grandparents' generation, when you got married you were joining an institution that had authority, told you the rules. You were supposed to act in accord with its procedures.

Now the shift is toward private ordering. Each individual couple defines the relationship for themselves. One way to think about it is, in an earlier day, the marriage vow defined the couple. And now it's really the couple defining the marriage vow.

So, a great deal more flexibility, freedom of choice, a lot more constant change in the institution, but the essential shift is toward private ordering and away from institutional authority.

RAY SUAREZ: Professor May, you have been writing about marriage for decades. Do you buy that definition, couples, rather than submitting themselves to established ideas, shaping marriage for themselves?

ELAINE TYLER MAY, University of Minnesota: Well, I don't think it's that new, really, that couples have been shaping the institution of marriage.

I think what's different is that people don't need to marry anymore for the same reasons that they did in the past, and that there have always been changes in the patterns of marriage demography for the last 100 years or so, and longer ago than that.

My interpretation, marriage as an individual human freedom and right, and away from being dictated by institutions (religious or government).