Rich Lowry explains at National Review Online why the former is the latter.
With the Left feverishly attempting to squash unwelcome speech on college campuses, with the president of the United States musing about tightening libel laws, with prominent liberals asserting that so-called hate speech is not protected by the First Amendment, free speech in America at least has one reliable friend — the Supreme Court of the United States.
In a firm 8-0 decision, the court slapped down the Patent and Trademark Office for denying a band federal trademark registration for the name “The Slants,” a derogatory term for Asian-Americans. The case involves a very small corner of federal law, but implicates the broader logic of political correctness, which is that speech should be silenced for the greater good if there is a chance that someone, somewhere might be offended by it. …
… The litigation hinged on a provision of federal trademark law referred to as the “disparagement clause.” This clause forbids registration for any trademark “which may disparage … persons, living or dead, institutions, beliefs, or national symbols, or bring them into contempt or disrepute.” Taken literally, this provision would forbid the disparagement of the KKK, an institution; or Benito Mussolini, a person who is dead; or Vladimir Putin, a person who is living.
The trademark office interprets the clause with all the wisdom you’d expect of a federal bureaucracy. As the trademark office’s manual puts it, an examiner determines whether or not the mark would be found disparaging by a “substantial composite, although not necessarily a majority, of the referenced group.” So, merely a plurality of the offended will do, and common sense is no defense: “The fact that an applicant may be a member of that group or has good intentions underlying its use of a term does not obviate the fact that a substantial composite of the referenced group would find the term objectionable.”
This is classic safe-space reasoning — the harm that would allegedly befall some portion of a group from encountering an offending trademark should trump the free-speech rights of the likes of The Slants.