Robert Heinlein described love as putting the other person's welfare in front of our own. Not bad, at least, as good as any. My ex spent a goodly portion of our "marriage" with nearly a daily explaination of my love as an intermittant, short lived sometime thing, which depended upon constant vigilence in the real world. "If you really loved me you'd..." she would say. For me, the quintessential romanticist, it is difficult to imagine "true" love as needing road maps, guidelines, or footnotes. Like respiration, balance, vision, and other hypo-thalmaicly originated impulses of the human being, it must be automatic, lest we forget to do it one day and die.
The theory: Now, supposedly, if I truly love you and you get DFed for some reason, and I continue to show my love to you, you will never repent, turn around and 'get right with the lord'. If you truly loved me, you would never have gotten DFed in the first place, but now that you are, and if you want my love once more, you'll walk the straight and narrow.
Two thoughts on the DF, at least, these are what I was told just before I got the ax: DFing is a necessary protection for the congregation body (like divorce for the battered wife?), and the congo doesn't DF anybody, they DF themselves.
But I think that what you're really asking is what if the %^%$#%$$ "elders" who set this up were as wrong as a two dollar whore snorting crack! Good question. Supposedly, there are methods of "appeal", letter writting and so forth, but I've never heard of this being particularly successful. However, as a person who truly loves you, the ball (so to speak) is now in my court. If I love you I will stand by you, openly and without fear. Why? Because if what has happened is wrong, Jehovah, by definition, will be on "our" side. If the decision that has been foisted against you is wrong, then I would be angering Jehovah by continuing the injustice. If you were, say, my child and living on your own, and you fell afoul of the GB I would naturally ask you if the "charges" were true and if you said no, then, hey, the bozos messed up and I would refuse to add insult to injury. If you said that the "charges" were true, then I would ask you why you did them and you would tell me. If you had killed someone because you just wanted to know what it was like to watch someone die, I probably wouldn't be spending much time around you. But most likely for personal safety reasons than religious. If you said that the charges were true but that you felt bad about it and you said that you were sorry, then you shouldn't have been DFed in the first place (this goes under the Bozos messed up category mentioned earlier) and I would stand with you and help you get right again. If you told me that it was true and you ran to a neighbor and found solace in that person's arms because your marriage mate was a bastard/bitch and that you had no choice and this was a way of bringing necessary attention and so on; well, because I love you, you would get the benfit of the doubt and I would help you as much as I could.
Now, if you refused to tell me what happened, I would go to the "elders" and check their side of the story. Until I heard something from you, I would accept their version of the story and make a decision as to whether your crime warranted my inattention. However, I would have serious doubts as to your love toward me if you couldn't bring yourself to tell me. If the "elders" refused to tell me the story (this actually happened concerning an incident with my daughter-in-law, not DFing, but PR) I would, once again, give you the benefit and assume that they hosed it. Again.
Just my thoughts.
