The 9th Circuit ruling — regarding Idaho and Nevada — comes one day after same-sex couples began marrying again in Utah.

WASHINGTON — Idaho and Nevada's bans on same-sex couples' marriages are unconstitutional, a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Tuesday.

Judge Stephen Reinhardt, writing for the unanimous panel, applied additional scrutiny to the claimed sexual orientation discrimination the same-sex couples in the two states faced by the bans. The 9th Circuit held earlier this year that such additional scrutiny — heightened scrutiny — applies to sexual orientation claims under equal protection.

He wrote:

We hold that the Idaho and Nevada laws at issue violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because they deny lesbians and gays who wish to marry persons of the same sex a right they afford to individuals who wish to marry persons of the opposite sex, and do not satisfy the heightened scrutiny standard we adopted in SmithKline.

The ruling comes one day after the Supreme Court denied five states' appeals of other marriage cases where other appeals courts had ruled that those states' bans are unconstitutional.

Under the court's rules, the mandate — which puts the ruling into effect — will not issue from the 9th Circuit until "7 days after the expiration of the time for filing a petition for rehearing or 7 days from the denial of a petition for rehearing, unless the Court directs otherwise."

Of course, as Nevada's governor and attorney general stopped defense of their state's ban after the 9th Circuit ruled that heightened scrutiny applied to sexual orientation claims, it is possible that they could take action to attempt to allow the ruling, as to their state, to go into effect sooner.