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.