By JACK HEALY

JAN. 8, 2014 - New York Times

DENVER — The fortunes of 1,300 newlywed same-sex couples in Utah were thrown into turmoil on Wednesday after the governor’s office announced that it would not recognize their marriages while it presses its legal efforts to limit marriages to one man and one woman.

It was the latest twist in the 19-day tale of same-sex marriage in one of the country’s most socially conservative states. Last month, a surprise ruling by a federal judge overturned Utah’s voter-approved ban on marriage among gay couples, prompting hundreds to rush jubilantly to county clerk’s offices to obtain Utah marriage licenses.

After unsuccessfully petitioning two lower courts to halt those weddings, Utah succeeded Monday in persuading the United States Supreme Court to issue a stay while the state appeals. The ruling blocked any additional same-sex unions from taking place and effectively reinstated Utah’s disputed ban.

“The original laws governing marriage in Utah return to effect pending final resolution by the courts,” Derek Miller, the chief of staff to Gov. Gary Herbert, wrote in a memo to state officials outlining the state’s move. “It is important to understand that those laws include not only a prohibition of performing same-sex marriages but also recognizing same-sex marriages.”

For gay couples, it was a moment of emotional whiplash after the elation and celebration of the past two weeks. They said they still hoped a higher court would agree that same-sex couples in Utah have a fundamental right to marry, but they worried about the effects of the state’s actions on their families and finances.

Nicole Campolucci, a mother of three who married her partner on Dec. 23, said the couple had planned to meet with a family lawyer to discuss how Ms. Campolucci could become a legal guardian to her partner’s children. She said that now seemed unlikely.

“We are starting to feel persecuted,” she said. “The state is going out of their way to make things as difficult for people as they possibly can.”

Clifford Rosky, the chairman of Equality Utah, a leading gay rights group, said that the marriage licenses obtained by about 1,300 same-sex couples were still valid despite the stay, and that they deserved the same rights as any other married couples in Utah. Advocates predicted gay couples would sue to challenge Utah’s move and to seek recognition for their marriages.

“The State of Utah is now trying to take back all of these marriages by refusing to recognize them,” Mr. Rosky said in a statement. “This is an unprecedented step, which inflicts severe harms on more than 1,000 families.”

Utah is now treading onto relatively untested legal ground. In 2004, the California Supreme Court voided 4,000 same-sex marriages that had been granted in San Francisco that year, saying that the unions were prohibited under state law.

But four years later, the same court struck down those restrictions as unconstitutional. Thousands of gay Californians were then able to wed before state voters approved Proposition 8, which limited marriage to opposite-sex partners. The same-sex couples who had previously exchanged vows retained their rights. A federal court ruling has since allowed same-sex marriages to resume.

Officials in Utah had already begun offering benefits to many same-sex couples, issuing new driver’s licenses to people who had taken their spouses’ last names and adding same-sex partners to health insurance plans. Mr. Miller said the status of those applications would now be frozen as the legal fight moves forward. So although Utah will not provide any additional benefits, it will not revoke what it has already conferred, officials said.

The state’s decision also does not invalidate any same-sex marriages. Instead, said Mr. Miller, the chief of staff, it effectively suspends them in place, freezing benefit applications or other petitions for legal protections. “If you were at Step 4, you stay at Step 4,” he said in an interview. “If you got all the way through, you stay all the way through. If you didn’t get started, you haven’t gotten started.”

The state’s attorney general, Sean D. Reyes, said Utah had created a team to review benefit applications and policies that could affect same-sex couples “on a case-by-case basis.”

Gay rights advocates excoriated the state’s actions, saying that heterosexual couples are not subjected to such scrutiny or uncertainty. They said the state’s actions had created a stratified landscape where people’s benefits and legal protections hinged on when they had submitted an application to a state agency.

Elaine Stehel was one who got in under the wire. When Judge Robert J. Shelby of Federal District Court handed down a ruling on Dec. 20 declaring Utah’s ban unconstitutional, Ms. Stehel and her partner of five years raced to the county clerk’s office and married that night.

She quickly applied to change her last name from Ball to Stehel, to get a new driver’s license and to add herself to the state-run health-insurance policy of her wife, who works as a state librarian. All those benefits have come through, she said, and she does not expect to lose them as the legal battle over marriage in Utah wends its way through the federal appeals process, and perhaps to the Supreme Court.

The appeals court has set a briefing schedule that concludes in late February, presumably to be followed by arguments before a three-judge panel.

Even as they exchanged gleeful vows in a dizzy swirl of news cameras and cheering onlookers, many gay couples said they knew the fate of their marriages ultimately lay in the hands of public officials and appointed judges. But Ms. Stehel, like other gay couples, said their marriages were real, and that they would not accept Utah’s decision without protest.

“You can’t take this away,” she said. “I’m a minister. I officiated at six weddings. I told every couple I married that this certificate I hold right now, they can’t take that away. And I and every other married couple will fight for it.”