PHOENIX (AP) — Two Phoenix men have gone to court to get a marriage license despite Arizona laws banning same-sex marriages.

Harold Donald Standhardt, 34, and Tod Alan Keltner, 37, filed a special-action lawsuit in the Arizona Court of Appeals against the state and the clerk of Maricopa County Superior Court.

The lawsuit asks that the Court of Appeals overturn two state laws that allow marriages only between men and women and also order the court clerk to issue a marriage license to Standhardt and Keltner.

Standhardt and Keltner were denied a marriage license when they applied for one, according to the lawsuit filed July 7.

Standhardt and Keltner “have been in (a) committed relationship for over six years and have lived together and resided in Maricopa County for over five years,” their lawsuit stated. “They, like their heterosexual counterparts, wish to marry.”

The lawsuit said Arizona’s ban on gay marriages, enacted in 1996, violates various state and federal constitutional protections, including the Arizona Constitution’s right to privacy.

“We have the same basic rights as any other couple,” said Standhardt, the co-owner of a travel agency with Keltner.

The filing of the lawsuit was publicized July 14 by the Center for Arizona Policy, a Scottsdale-based group which lobbies on behalf of social conservatives.

Center President Len Munsil, who said he drafted the 1996 law enacted by the Legislature to ban gay marriages, said the group would attempt to intervene in the case to defend the ban.

The lawsuit cited several court rulings at the federal and state level, including a June 26 ruling in which the U.S. Supreme Court decided that a Texas law banning gay sex was an unconstitutional violation of privacy.

The landmark civil rights ruling reverses course from a decision 17 years ago that states could punish gays and lesbians for what such laws historically called deviant sex.

Arizona repealed its own ban on sodomy in 2001.

The lawsuit also cited a 2002 decision by the Arizona Supreme Court, in a case involving state funding for abortions for low-income women, that the state could not enact laws that grant any citizen privileges while denying them to others.