[erimir]

Seems weird to me.

Trademark protection isn't government speech or private speech, it's government restriction of speech.

By granting the trademark, the government agrees that others can be penalized for using the same name.

Or am I totally off-base?

You might want to conclude that this band's name should've been allowed given that it was not intended to disparage and wouldn't likely be interpreted that way either. I would tend to side with the band, but there's a lot of stupidity out there. There are people who would argue it's racist for an ethnic group to be allowed to use a slur and not everyone else, and it might be the only way to satisfy the twits is to ban them altogether. So I might also say in our political context it maybe makes sense to prohibit them as well. (Their issue is that the word is polysemous, and the slur meaning is, in fact, realized partly due to the context of them being an Asian band. But a trademark on "The Gooks" probably wouldn't be allowed in any context under the old rules.)

I suppose prohibiting trademarks of a certain type would tend to mean that businesses won't tend to use the prohibited names, which could be abused to stifle speech.

But I tend to be of the opinion that the government is too liberal in granting trademarks, patents and copyrights (or makes them last too long).

Anyway, not a totally straightforward case.