JUNEAU, AK—U.S. District Court Judge Timothy Burgess rules in favor of same-sex marriages in the state. The decision paved the way for same-sex couples to marry in Alaska for the first time, last Sunday.

The state announced that it would appeal the ruling, despite recent higher court rulings striking down similar bans around the country, according to the Alaska Dispatch.

“The court finds that Alaska’s ban on same-sex marriage and refusal to recognize same sex marriages lawfully entered in other states is unconstitutional as a deprivation of basic due process and equal protection principles under the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution,” Burgess wrote in a order in the case Hamby v. Parnell.

The Hamby suit was filed in May by five same-sex couples. It challenged the state’s constitutional amendment limiting marriage to one man and one woman, approved by voters in 1998. Both parties in the Hamby case made oral arguments in the case on Friday.

“As Alaska’s governor, I have a duty to defend and uphold the law and the Alaska Constitution,” Gov. Sean Parnell said in a press release. “Although the district court today may have been bound by the recent Ninth Circuit panel opinion, the status of that opinion and the law in general in this area is in flux. I will defend our constitution.”

Parnell was referring to a ruling last week from a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled to overturn similar marriage bans in Idaho and Nevada. Same-sex marriage advocates said the 9th Circuit ruling would likely lead to the quick overturn of Alaska’s ban on gay marriage because the bans were similar and Alaska also falls under the jurisdiction of that court.

Even as the state vowed to appeal the decision, officials with the state’s Bureau of Vital Statistics said they would begin accepting applications for same-sex marriage licenses at 8 a.m. last Monday.

“The license application begins the three-day waiting period before the license can be issued. All marriages in Alaska must have the marriage license issued before the ceremony is performed,” wrote Phillip Mitchell, head of the Bureau of Vital Statistics. “We expect our office will be busy tomorrow but we will make every effort to help customers as quickly as possible.”

Two of the plaintiffs in Hamby vs. Parnell, Courtney Lamb and Stephanie Pearson, said Sunday that they plan to be among the first to apply for a marriage license. The Anchorage medical biller and graphic designer have been a couple for two years.

“We’ll go down and file for it tomorrow, and then we’ll work on finding somebody to marry us,” said Lamb.

In 1998, Alaska was one of the first states to implement a ban on same-sex marriages when voters approved an amendment to the Alaska Constitution defining marriage as between one man and one woman.

Sunday’s ruling makes Alaska the 30th state to have full marriage equality, according to Evan Wolfson, founder and president of Freedom to Marry, a national political action group that has worked toward overturning marriage bans across the country since 2003.

Burgess found that none of the state’s arguments in support of the ban — including its primary argument that the issue of marriage should fall to voters, not the courts — were constitutional.

Burgess, who was appointed to the bench by President George W. Bush in 2005, wrote in his order that the state offered little evidence supporting the reasoning that the marriage decision falls to the voters. Even if the amendment to the Alaska Constitution was not designed to discriminate, as the state argued, Burgess said that it clearly did.

“By singling out homosexual couples and banning their ability to marry an individual of their choosing, it is impossible to assert that all Alaskans are equal under the state’s laws,” Burgess wrote.

Jim Minnery, the head of Alaska Family Action group, which opposes same-sex marriage, said Sunday that he viewed the judge’s decision as a “subversion of the democratic process.”

“What this really comes across as is not so much the people’s constitution as individuals in black robes,” Minnery said. “That’s disconcerting to a lot of us.”