Billy, uniforms would look too weird to the outsiders.
Agreed. They don't want to look too weird... but they have no problems acting strangely, talking nonsense, and trying to teach rubbish to outsiders. So they can be weird, just don't look weird.
And there are gray areas, but not to Headquarters or your local BoE.
Headquarters certainly set a terrible example trying to make gray areas completely black-and-white. For supposedly being a "spiritual paradise" filled with "spiritually mature" brothers and sisters, bethel "family" had tons of rules for everything, well beyond the few rules of my family at home. Your room was policed for what music you had, pictures, etc. and had to be completely clean and organized before the housekeeper got there. My mom was satisfied as long as my room smelled okay and wasn't a serious fire hazard. The clothing rules were crazy. With no casual clothes allowed in the lobby, you're expected to go out for pizza with friends or to play football in the park wearing a tie? My parents didn't care as long as there were no "dirty" words on my t shirt, but I had to look right for the meetings. The bethel routine was, one person does something that Ted Jaracz or George Couch didn't like, so some rules get explained at Morning Worship. Then as the list of rules grow, they become harder to remember, new arrivals aren't aware of them all, and older members are incapable of reasoning on things, just unquestioningly trying to follow rules.
A handful of things are conscience matters and the conscience should be trained by the literature and the leaders. Anything where they didn't clearly spell out directions, you should come to them and ask and abandon an independent path when they tell you something different.
I'm guessing that there are others here that knew the type of elder that would condemn things after the fact that they said nothing against beforehand. Or the type that would allow their own kids to do things that other kids would not be allowed to do. Hmmm, examples, a sister with unbelieving family would be directed by the elders and shown in WT publications that it was wrong to celebrate Thanksgiving with her family. Yet, she later hears that several of those elders had family dinners on Thanksgiving. Time to try to repaint that gray area, "It's okay because we went out in service that morning." "Our whole family is JWs so it's okay." "We had lasagne, not turkey, so our family dinner wasn't Thanksgiving."
In bethel, we had what we called, "The Book of Angles." There were so many rules and procedures to follow that it became impossible to get some things done, and it was extremely difficult to do some things that we wanted to do. So instead of facing this crap straight on, we would come up with "angles", ways to get around rules and requirements without fully breaking them. Or having enough justification in order to explain away some conflict. This attitude trickles down to the congregation. Example: "No higher education!" Yet the elders will exploit the angle, "It's okay because my kid lives at home, is auxiliary pioneering, plans to go to bethel, and we're certainly not encouraging others to pursue higher education."
So to complicate what would otherwise be a gray area, a lot of us figured ways to make those "bad" areas, "good" for our case.
It is, after all, a crazy cult.
