Configuration file precedence

Against what I read in the yum.conf man page, and against what I  
would consider normal design for parsing/processing configuration  
files, it seems that my yum.conf file is trumping my yum.repos.d  
files when setting the "gpgcheck" directive.
The yum.conf file always wins. Shouldn't the more detailed config  
always override the global one? The yum.conf file says that if I set  
"gpgcheck=1" in the yum.conf file - that only sets the "default"  
action for the repos, implying that I can override the default with  
an explicit "gpgcheck=0" in a given repos.d config file.

What's up?

Thanks,
Wayne Sweatt