The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected a Schuylkill County clerk's request to halt same-sex marriages in Pennsylvania until their legality is decided on a federal level.

The ruling, handed down without comment by Judge Samuel Alito, came just two days after Register of Wills/Orphan's Court Clerk Theresa Santai-Gaffney filed the request.She has the option of asking another judge to consider her appeal.Santai-Gaffney did not return a telephone call to her office early Thursday.One week ago, the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals denied Santai-Gaffney's challenge to U.S. District Court Judge John E. Jones' June 18 rejection of her request to intervene in an appeal of Jones' May 20 ruling that found the state's ban on same-sex marriage unconstitutional.Gov. Tom Corbett on May 21 announced he would not appeal Jones' ruling. Santai-Gaffney filed her request to intervene two weeks later.In her initial request to intervene, Santai-Gaffney had argued that Jones' May 20 ruling made her job of issuing marriage licenses unclear, and that the matter should be decided by the states, not the federal government.Jones' denial ruling rebuked her arguments."There is nothing remotely ambiguous about how Santai-Gaffney must perform her duties relative to issuing marriage licenses. For her to represent otherwise is wholly disingenuous. At bottom, we have before us a contrived legal argument by a private citizen who seeks to accomplish what the chief executive of the commonwealth, in his wisdom, has declined to do," he wrote.