Ingham County Clerk Barbara Byrum said she was expecting a ruling sooner.

“I was hoping for a ruling a while back but I look forward to them ruling in favor of love and equality,” Byrum said.

Byrum, one of the county clerks who opened the courthouse after a district court judge declared the ban on gay marriage unconstitutional, said the couples she married are in legal limbo.

“(Same-sex married couples) have been continued to be treated as second-class citizens in our state, and I look forward to the day when all loving couples have the ability to marry,” Byrum said.

The Supreme Court decided on Oct. 6 that it would not review the rulings made by lower courts that removed state bans on same-sex marriage.

MSU College of Law professor Mae Kuykendall said the Supreme Court’s action does not count as a ruling.

“They didn’t do a ruling, they merely refused to hear the cases and they didn’t gave any explanation,” Kuykendall said. “We don’t know who voted how.”

Kuykendall said the Supreme Court’s decision to decline to hear a case would make the lower courts decision stand in place.

“The Supreme Court is not saying that there is a right to marriage equality to gay people, it has merely declined to review cases for the circuits,” Kuykendall said.

The states of Colorado, Indiana, Kansas, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming were affected by the Supreme Court’s refusal and can issue marriage licenses.

In Michigan, the circumstances of these wedded couples are not yet clear.

“We still have a status quo in Michigan,” Kuykendall said. “So the couples that got married in the brief period after the district court issued its decision are kind of in a gray area because Michigan still says that there’s no such thing as gay marriage.”

Although Kuykendall said she didn’t know how the judges in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit will vote, she acknowledged two of them are in polar oppositions — one wants to uphold the ban, while the other wants to overturn it.

“The U.S. Supreme Court has chosen not to review marriage cases in other circuits at this time. Michigan joins Ohio, Tennessee and Kentucky in awaiting a decision by the 6th Circuit in our pending cases, which we expect will be resolved soon,” Attorney General Bill Schuette’s spokeswoman Joy Yearout said in a statement.