As an elder in the late '70's I served more than my share of time on Judicial Committees. The JC was made up of three elders: The presiding overseer, WT study overseer and Bible Study overseer. Since these positions rotated yearly, the average elder would serve three years straight on the JC. Due to various circumstances, I served almost five years in a row. We had a congregation of about 100 pubs., almost 200 meeting attenders counting the children, unbaptized family members, etc. These were middle to lower middle class people, a lot of young families, teenagers and a nice mix of old timers. We had our share of dedicated sisters with unbelieving mates .
It was my luck to be serving during the time when the GB was handing down a lot of nitty gritty no-no's of sexual conduct, i.e. Certain sexual practices between married people, masturbation, a homosexual mate was NOT grounds for scriptural divorce, fine points of sexual conduct that might or might not be grounds for divorce (a married brother having an intense 'wet' affair with a another woman was not nice but it wasn't grounds for his wife to divorce him if he didn't "put it in".
Well, they came out of the woodwork. We would be approached regularly by brothers and sisters who were affected by all of the above. How would you like to spend dozens of hours over a period of months and years having both informal ("Brother Doe, could I/we speak to you in private for a moment?") and committee meetings with brothers and sisters on these intimate topics:
-A sixteen yr old boy who can't stop masturbating. Underwear ads in the Sears catalog would set him off. He tried to quit and couldn't. Every time he slipped up he would come to us to ask for help (almost weekly) We had to tell him it was very serious and he needed to stop wether we personally thought it was serious or not.
-A 68 yr old brother whose wife had cancer. He had the same basic problem as the 16 yr old boy. He would cry. He died 1 month after his wife passed away.
-An attractive young married couple who felt they needed help from the elders to help them stop performing oral sex on each other. This went on for months.
-A young sister whose husband forced her to perform oral sex, which she had been doing willingly until the WT came out. Then, overnight, giving him a BJ became an issue as serious as a blood transfusion. Did she have grounds for divorce?
- A beautiful, sweet young woman with 2 children had a selfish, controlling, asshole husband who was not baptized but came to all the meetings. She was on the verge of a nervous breakdown and was confiding her problems to an older sister whom she trusted. One day after a couple of glasses of wine, the older sister seduced her into some lesbian acts. This young woman fell apart, I'm sure she would have been diagnosed as having a nervous breakdown if she had gotten professional help. She came to us and confessed and was unconsolable. She never recovered. Her health fell apart. She died a few years later when she was in her early 30's.
There were many more, but my point is that within a very short time the WT Society backed off on many of these issues. Unfortunately, the damage to real people, good people, had been done. The almighty Watchtower juggernaut rolled right over them with no apology or acknowledgement of the turmoil it had caused those who tried to obey every word they published.
One evening about a year after I was DF'd I took a glass of wine and my old committee notebooks out to the patio and burned them page by page on the BBQ. By the time I was finished I had tears running down my face and it wasn't because of the smoke.
I hate the Watchtower Society, they have hurt a lot of good, honest and sweet people.