SEATTLE — Pascal Tessier is a 17-year-old Eagle Scout in suburban Maryland who says scouting made him who he is today, with its lessons about morality, leadership and responsibility. And those very strengths, this openly gay high school senior said, are what compel and equip him to fight back now against Scout policies on gays that he believes are wrong.

After long, anxious debate, the Boy Scouts’ national board voted a year ago to allow openly gay youths to participate in scouting, while continuing to exclude gay leaders age 18 and over. It was promoted as a compromise intended to offer the organization time to figure out how to proceed.

Instead, it has brought the Scouts only more ire from all directions and produced a house divided.

The awkwardness of the compromise — don’t-ask-don’t-tell silence on the one hand, and a supposedly welcoming embrace on the other, with an 18th birthday dividing the two — has emboldened gay scouts like Pascal to step forward with passionate editorials and online petitions.

Conservative critics have been no less vehement. Rob Schwarzwalder, a senior vice president at the Family Research Council, a Washington-based group, said: “Judeo-Christian sexual ethics are fixed. Dislike or reject them, if you wish, but they are not malleable. How can two boys both pledge to be ‘morally straight’ when they operate out of two different moral perspectives concerning human sexuality?”