A woman has filed for a divorce from her estranged wife in Mississippi.

Lauren Beth Czekala-Chatham and Dana Ann Melancon married in California in 2008 but lived together in Mississippi until they split in 2010.

Now Czekala-Chatham is asking the conservative state to recognize her marriage so that she can get divorced.

“My client is not looking to start gay marriage in Mississippi,” Czekala-Chatham's lawyer J. Wesley Hisaw told the AP. “She wants the marriage from another state to be recognized so she can get a divorce and protect herself.”

Czekala-Chatham said that she was pursuing a divorce over concerns that Melancon could someday be awarded her estate over her children from a prior relationship. In her divorce petition, filed September 11, she cites adultery and desertion as grounds for divorce and asks for alimony plus the couple's house in Walls, Mississippi.

“This needs to be settled because if it's not and something happened to me, the state wouldn't know what to do with things like wills because they've never been challenged on it,” Czekala-Chatham told The Commercial Appeal.

“There's no right to terminate a gay marriage in Mississippi any more than there is a right to consummate one,” Matt Steffey, a constitutional law professor at Mississippi College, told the AP. “This is a test case. At worst, it's simply an exercise in futility. That said, all test cases look like an exercise in futility until they succeed.”

Czekala-Chatham said she was willing to take her case all the way to the Mississippi Supreme Court.