Hannah Jones at CityPages reports:
Did you know that grabbing someone's butt without their permission is NOT illegal here in MN?
That’s thanks to an exemption that dates back to 1987, when Minnesota Senator Allan Spear, a Minneapolis Democrat who proposed the amendment, thought it would be important to leave a little wiggle room with regard to “fanny patting.”
He told the Star Tribune that he didn’t want anyone to think it was necessarily okay to grab someone’s butt without consent—but that maybe it was important to keep it more on the side of “improper” and “unsocial” than criminal.
Why? No one really knows for sure. Senators John Marty and Carolyn Laine, both Democrats, were sponsors of the 1988 sexual conduct law making groping illegal, and things were … different … back then.