COLUMBIA, S.C. — As the nation waits for the Supreme Court to decide whether same-sex marriages should be legal nationwide, another, more mundane front has opened in the wedding wars: the offices of the state and local officials who perform civil marriages and issue licenses.

Republican state legislators in Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas have introduced bills this year that would prohibit state or local government employees from issuing marriage licenses to gay couples, despite federal court rulings declaring bans on same-sex marriage unconstitutional in those states and questions about the constitutionality of the proposed state laws. The bills would also strip the salaries of employees who issued the licenses.

A second South Carolina bill would give some government employees the ability to opt out of issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples if they objected on the basis of a “sincerely held religious belief.” In Utah, a bill would allow officials like judges, mayors and county clerks who solemnize marriages to opt out on religious grounds. In North Carolina, the president pro tempore of the State Senate, Phil Berger, a Republican, filed a similar bill Wednesday that would apply to “magistrates and registers of deeds.”

And in Alabama, a rift developed among probate judges who could not agree on whether a federal judge’s ruling Friday, which called the state’s current bans on same-sex marriage unconstitutional, meant that they actually had to begin issuing licenses.