A federal appeals court in Cincinnati has ruled in favor of states' rights to deny marriage rights and benefits to gay and lesbian couples, saying any changes to a state's constitution should be taken up its legislators.

A divided three-judge panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held that state laws in Ohio, Kentucky, Michigan and Tennessee prohibiting marriage between same-sex couples do violate those couples' rights to equal protection and due process under the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution — but that legalizing of same-sex marriage is a task best left to legislators and voters in the individual states.

“We cannot deny the costs to (same-sex couples) of allowing the States to work through this profound policy debate,” Judge Jeffrey Sutton wrote in the court's majority opinion, adding that restricting the definition of marriage to only include opposite-sex couples “denies gay couples the opportunity to publicly solemnize, to say nothing of subsidize, their relationships under state law.”

“In addition to depriving them of this status, it deprives them of benefits that range from the profound (the right to visit someone in a hospital as a spouse or parent) to the mundane (the right to file joint tax returns),” Judge Sutton wrote. “These harms affect not only gay couples but also their children. Do the benefits of standing by the traditional definition of marriage make up for these costs? The question demands an answer — but from elected legislators, not life-tenured judges.”

The panel's ruling overturns a series of previous lower court decisions that had partially or wholly struck down state-level anti-gay marriage laws within the 6th Circuit's jurisdiction. The ruling is the first in more than a year to be issued by a federal appeals court in support of states' legislative rights to exclude same-sex couples from spousal rights, protections and benefits enjoyed by opposite-sex couples, including eligibility rights and privileges under state tax codes, insurance regulations and health care rules.

In June 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that provisions of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act that defined marriage for federal purposes as the union of one man and one woman violated gay couples' constitutional rights to due process.

Since then, judicial panels in four other U.S. appellate circuits have ruled in favor of same-sex couples seeking equal protection under state and federal laws, invalidating prohibitions on same-sex marriage in 15 states.