Every now and then the sun shines on a sleeping dog’s butt.
Via WSJ
The American Civil Liberties Union is siding with the Washington Redskins in the legal dispute over last year’s cancellation of the football team’s trademark.
In a brief filed in federal court on Thursday, the group says last year’s decision by a U.S. Patent & Trademark Office judicial panel to strip the team’s name of trademark protection violated the Constitution’s ban on suppressing speech disfavored by the government.
Pro-Football Inc., the company that owns the Redskins, filed a federal lawsuit in August challenging the trademark office’s ruling and the constitutionality of a trademark law prohibiting trademarks that “disparage…persons, living or dead, institutions, beliefs, or national symbols.”[…]
States the ACLU brief:
[T]here is little doubt that many Native Americans view the word “Redskins” as at least problematic, if not outright racist … But the question of whether certain speech is distasteful is entirely distinct from the question of whether the government can constitutionally disadvantage it for that reason. Under the First Amendment, viewpoint-based regulation of private speech is never acceptable, regardless of the controversy of the viewpoint…
By scheduling the cancellation of the Redskins’ trademark because the word expresses a disparaging viewpoint, the government violated the First Amendment. This Court should end this formal system of viewpoint discrimination by issuing a narrow ruling that strikes down those portions of Section 2(a) of the Lanham Act that prohibit registration of “immoral,” “scandalous,” or “disparag[ing]” marks.