I was reminded of a controversy last spring at Ponaganset High School as I drove through New Mexico on vacation two weeks ago. As The Breeze reported in May, “The issue (of Native American insult) arose again after members of the local Nipmuc tribe contacted the Rhode Island Commission on Prejudice and Bias to mediate with PHS for the removal of the mascot, which depicts the head of a chieftain wearing a headdress.”

I was driving through Shiprock, in northwest New Mexico, and noted that Shiprock High, right there on Route 64, was “Home of the Chieftains.” Interestingly, the school sat right in the middle of a Navajo reservation. You’d think Navajos might have had a say in that, and likely see no insult.

I checked in with Sports Editor Steven Bortstein at the Farmington (N.M.) Daily-Times to see if there had been a problem there with the name, as this new era of “offense” and political correctness sweeps the land. He replied, in part, “In my many discussions with people of different persuasions and political and social ideologies, the nickname Chieftains is not considered to be offensive to a majority of those I’ve spoken with. Those with whom I have spoken are not offended by Chieftains, they’re not offended by Warriors, they’re not offended by Chiefs or Indians.”

Amanda Blackhorse, a Navajo who successfully moved a federal agency to withdraw trademark protections from the Washington Redskins because it considers the team's name derogatory, lives on a reservation where Navajos root for the Red Mesa High School Redskins. She opposes this name; the Native Americans who picked and retain it evidently do not.

The Patent and Trademark Office acted on a 1946 law banning trademarks that "may disparage" persons. "May" gives the agency latitude to disregard evidence regarding how many people actually feel disparaged, or feel that others should feel disparaged.

Blackhorse speaks of "the majority of Native American people who have spoken out on this." This would seem implausible even if a 2004 poll had not found that 90 percent of Native Americans were not offended by the Redskins' name. A 2013 AP-GfK poll showed that 79 percent of Americans of all ethnicities opposed changing it, and just 18 percent of "nonwhite football fans" favored changing it.

The federal agency acted in the absence of general or Native American revulsion about "Redskins," and probably because of this absence. Are the Americans who are paying attention to this controversy comfortable with government saying, in effect, that if people are not offended, they should be, so government must decide what uses of language should be punished?

In today's regulatory state, agencies often do pretty much as they please, exercising discretion unconstrained by law.