Angela Schaefer, left, and partner, Jennifer Schaefer hold an application for a marriage license at the clerk's office at the Johnson County Courthouse in Olathe, Kan., Wednesday, Oct. 8, 2014. They are due to obtain their license Tuesday, after the weekend and the Columbus Day holiday Monday.

Topeka ? Wedding plans of gay couples across Kansas were in limbo Thursday with all but one of the state’s 105 counties refusing to issue marriage licenses and the American Civil Liberties Union preparing to sue in a bid to overturn the state’s ban on same-sex unions.

“We’re pretty close,” said Doug Bonney, legal director for the ACLU of Kansas.

Voters in Kansas approved the constitutional amendment banning gay marriage in April 2005 by a 70 percent to 30 percent margin. That followed votes the previous November in which 13 other states approved similar amendments.

But in recent months, several federal appeals courts have struck down state laws and constitutional amendments, saying they violate the rights of same-sex couples to equal protection, as guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear appeals in five of those cases, including two that came from the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which has jurisdiction over Kansas.

Since Monday, the ACLU and the Kansas Equality Coalition, a group that advocates for gay rights, have encouraged same-sex couples to apply for marriage licenses in courthouses throughout the state in order to line up potential plaintiffs to challenge the Kansas law.

“Right now I’m drafting a complaint for three couples,” Bonney said. “We might add a fourth. Right now, we have a good distribution from around the state.”

In many cases, Bonney said, couples are being allowed to fill out applications for a marriage license, and then are told to come back after a mandatory thee-day waiting period to pick up a license. And in most counties, same-sex couples are being denied.

So far, only Johnson County has announced plans to issue licenses to gay couples. The county could be poised to issue the state’s first same-sex marriage license as soon as today, two days after Chief District Judge Kevin Moriarty ruled the county could no longer deny the applications.

Kansas has a three-day waiting period before licenses can be granted, but although Moriarty issued his ruling Wednesday, the county accepted one application Tuesday from a same-sex couple, said Sandy McCurdy, the county’s court clerk. By late Thursday afternoon, the county had accepted 42 applications.

Phone calls and emails sent to Attorney General Derek Schmidt from the Journal-World were not returned.

Bonney said one set of plaintiffs in his organization’s developing litigation is a lesbian couple from Douglas County who applied for a license Wednesday. But because Monday is Columbus Day, a court holiday, they won’t be officially told about their status until Tuesday.

It is virtually certain that the couple, whom Bonney did not identify, will be denied because also on Wednesday, Judge Robert Fairchild, chief judge of the Douglas County District Court, issued an administrative order saying the court will not approve applications from same-sex couples unless a higher court specifically strikes down the current language in the Kansas Constitution.

Scott Criqui, the vice-chair of the Lawrence chapter for the Equality Kansas Coalition, a group that advocates for gay rights, said the past several days have been exciting despite all the uncertainty still lingering around same-sex marriage’s legality in Kansas.

“It’s been a roller coaster,” he said. “From an activist standpoint, we’re going in the right direction. I think we’re almost there, so that’s really exciting even if it’s going to be a little confusing for a little while.”

Some counties initially refused to even hand out marriage license paperwork to same-sex couples until the lawyer for the Kansas Office of Judicial Administration sent an email Tuesday to chief judges suggesting that counties accept the applications and noted that litigation was likely.

Alyssa Gifford, a supervisor in Douglas County’s Clerk of the District Court office, said two same-sex couples have applied for a license in the county this week.

Elsewhere, a judge in south-central Kansas’ Cowley County issued an order Thursday saying that county would not issue same-sex marriage licenses at this point, but would hold on to applications for six months. If the law changes during that time, licenses would be approved.

Wyandotte County was accepting applications, but Chief Judge Wayne Lampson filed his first order rejecting a same-sex marriage application Thursday. Lampson wrote that Danen Haston and Roger Brown could re-apply if a court overturns the ban.

“We’ve taken oaths to uphold the constitution of Kansas, so until the constitution is found to be unconstitutional, you are kind of put in a dilemma,” Lampson said in a phone interview. “I wish the Supreme Court had actually taken it up and given us some direction across the country, because I think we are going to be left with disparity between the states, and we are even seeing disparity within Kansas.”