MINNESOTA
Washington Post
Crime for minister to have sex with someone who is seeking spiritual aid — even if minister doesn’t know that this is why the person came to him
By Eugene Volokh June 26
That’s what the Minnesota Supreme Court just held Wednesday in State v. Wenthe. Indeed, the minister could be guilty even if he had no reason to know that the person came to him seeking spiritual aid. So if you’re a minister (or a rabbi or anything else), someone — acquaintance or stranger — comes to you to talk, one thing leads to another, and you have sex, you are guilty of a felony if the reason the person approached you was to seek “religious or spiritual advice,” even if that person never stated that desire before you had sex.
The relevant Minnesota statute provides that it’s a felony if
A person who engages in sexual penetration with another person … [and]
(1) the actor is or purports to be a member of the clergy, the complainant is not married to the actor, and:
(i) the sexual penetration occurred during the course of a meeting in which the complainant sought or received religious or spiritual advice, aid, or comfort from the actor in private …
The argument in favor of such laws is similar to the argument for restrictions on psychotherapist-patient sex; indeed, another provision in the same statute applies if “the actor is a psychotherapist and the complainant is a patient of the psychotherapist and the sexual penetration occurred … during the psychotherapy session.” By analogy, then, sex during a clergy counseling session would be a crime. (Other provisions also make it a crime for clergy or psychotherapists to have sex with people with whom they have an ongoing counseling relationship, even if the sex doesn’t occur during a counseling session.) And the court could have interpreted the statute as applying in situations where there really is a clear counseling session, because the clergy member knows that he is being approached for counseling purposes. (Inferring a required mental state into a statute that is silent on the subject is quite normal in American law.)
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