A Kentucky county clerk defied court orders to grant same-sex couples with marriage licenses on Tuesday, telling applicants she was acting "under God's authority."

In what the newspaper described as a "raucous scene," Rowan County clerk Kim Davis briefly interacted with one couple, David Ermold and David Moore, who had entered her office trailed by television cameras and chanting protesters on both sides of the issue. Both sides tried to engage Sheriff Matt Sparks, who told Moore he could not arrest Davis over her refusal.

"I suspect the federal court will decide the next course of action," Sparks predicted. "There's actually people pushing - want us to arrest everybody here for disorderly conduct."

The U.S. Supreme Court had rejected an emergency application filed by Davis on Monday, and thus affirmed earlier district and appellate court decisions that compelled the clerk to comply with its landmark Obergefell v. Hodges ruling, which legalized same-sex marriage across the nation.

The local American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on Tuesday filed a motion in federal court asking a judge to hold Kim Davis, a divorced woman who has been in the county clerk business for 27 years, in contempt because she continued the defy those decisions, CNN noted. ACLU lawyers argue that the clerk has "violated a definite and specific order" and that the Supreme Court is left "with no choice" but to apply the measure.

Attorneys for the two gay couples who sued her asked U.S. District Judge David Bunning, who had originally held that Davis' religious objections do not "excuse her from performing the duties that she took an oath to perform," to punish the clerk with a fine, according to the Wall Street Journal.

"Since Defendant Davis continues to collect compensation from the Commonwealth (of Kentucky) for duties she fails to perform," they asked Bunning to "impose financial penalties sufficiently serious and increasingly onerous" to compel her immediate compliance without delay, they said in filings.