Only persons truly responsivle for injustice prefer silence and seek to impose it, as has long been the case with dictatorial governments and authoritarian religions in past as well as recent times.

Do Scriptural examples themesleves urge against disclosure of wrongs where these involve those in high places of authority?  It does not seem so, since the work of the Hebrew prophets frequently focused on such ones, those prophets making known the ways in which Israel’s leaders and men in authority, even high priests, had strayed from God’s standards with resulting problems.  Jehovah’s Witnesses have often pointed to such candor and openness as one of the evidences that the Bible is truthful, genuinely God’s Book.

What, too, of Jesus’ apostles and disciples? It was the very authority structure of God’s covenant people – its Sanhedrin, its elders, and the divinely constituted priestly authority – that objected strenuously to the publicizing done by the apostles of the unjust handling of Jesus’ case.  In both cases, that of the Hebrew prophets and that of the Christian disciples, those publicizing the wrongs did so out of respect for, and in obedience to, a higher authority, and in the interests of the people who needed to know. (CoC, Pg 41-42)

[Jehovah] is by no means averse to having injustice and misrepresentation uncovered, provided that the motivation is that of helping, of alerting people to realities that can aid them in arriving at right conclusions.  The saying that “evil prevails when good men remain silent” seems to have some validity here.

In virtually every instance, a small group of three to five men (a “judicial committee”) met with them in secret meetings, where those who came as witnesses could only give their testimony but not stay to witness the discussion.   Later a brief disfellowshiping announcement was read to the congregation that presented none of the testimony and none of the evidence in support of the disfellowshiping action.  After the reading of that announcement no Witness was supposed to talk with the persons disfellowshiped, thereby shutting down any possibility of their expressing themselves by way of an explanation to friends and associates.  For them to have done so before the disfellowshiping would have been counted as ‘proselytizing,’ ‘undermining the unity of the congregation,’ ‘sowing dissension,’ ‘forming a sect.’ For anyone to talk to them afterward would jeopardize the person’s own standing, make him liable for similar disfellowshipment.  An effective “quarantining’ is thus accomplished; a “lid” is placed on any discussion of the matter. (Page 38, CoC)

What must it mean to a mother, who has seen a baby daughter come forth from her own body, as nursed that baby, cared for it through illness, has trained the young girl through the formative years of life, living her problems with her, feeling her disappointments and sadnesses as if they were her own, shedding tears along with her tears– what must it mean to that mother to have her daughter, now an adult, suddenly reject her, and do so simply because her other sought to be true to her consience and to God?

What must it do to a father or mother to see a son or daughter marry and be told, for the same reason, that ‘it would be best if they did not appear at the wedding,’ or know that a daughter has given birth to a child and be told that they should not come to see their grandchild? (Page 38-39, CoC)

I find I can only use what Bible laws and principles I understand with any degree of sincerity and conviction in representing Jehovah and Christ Jesus, and if I have to administer these laws and principles in exercising my responsibility as an elder in the congregation I want to do it not because I have come to take for granted that this is Jehovah’s organization and I’m going to follow it no matter what it says, but do it because I truly believe it to be scripturally proven and correct. I truly want to continue believing as Paul admonished the Thessalonians in the second chapter, verse 13, to accept the word of God, not as of men, but as it truthfully is, as the word of God. (CoC, Pg 52)

So the next time you go to a pho’ place and get hard wrap shell… Dip them in the hot water.