Justice Kennedy, the member of the court responsible for hearing emergency applications from the Ninth Circuit, entered a temporary stay on Wednesday morning on very short notice after a last-minute request from officials in Idaho. He acted so quickly that he included Nevada in his order.

A few hours later, Justice Kennedy issued a revised order, limiting the stay to Idaho.

In seeking the emergency stay, Idaho officials argued that the Supreme Court should block the Ninth Circuit’s decision because there was “a very strong likelihood that four justices will consider the issue presented here sufficiently meritorious to warrant this court’s review.”

That assertion was hard to reconcile with Monday’s developments, according to lawyers for the gay couples who had brought the suit. Every recent appeals court to rule on the question in the past year found that the Constitution protects a right to same-sex marriage, they said, and the Supreme Court turned away seven petitions seeking review of the question just days before.

The couples’ lawyers added that a stay would inflict deep harm.

“If a stay issues,” they said, the couples “will continue to be denied the right to enter into or have recognized the most important relation in life; they will continue to lack critical legal protections for their families, such as spousal-visitation and medical-decision-making rights in hospitals, that different-sex couples have long enjoyed; and their children will continue to be deprived of the security of knowing that their parents’ relationships are recognized by the state where they live.”