Tag: Family Friendly Zone

Family Friendly Propaganda Resurfaces for Ocean Boulevard

The “Family Friendly” propaganda is out in full force as Myrtle Beach City Council prepares to debate an entertainment overlay district ordinance for Ocean Boulevard this week.

The ordinance would ban the sale of certain products such as hookah pipes, tobacco, CBD oil and what it calls sexually suggestive merchandise, all of which are entirely legal products, within the overlay district.

All of this is purportedly being done because these products are not considered “family friendly” by at least some city council and city staff members.

In attempting to explain the ordinance, Mayor Brenda Bethune was quoted in local media last week as saying, “I’m not saying that those businesses are not what we want, I’m just saying that there currently is some merchandise that is not really in the scope of being family friendly,”

And it’s not like the city is attempting to ban the sale of these products citywide, merely along a specially selected section of Ocean Boulevard.

Bethune again, “We are not trying to target legal merchandise and say you can’t sell this anywhere in the city. What we’re saying is there’s a perception issue with some of these products, and they do attract children, they are marketed for children, and that it does promote drug use.”

So it’s okay if these products supposedly “attract children” and “promote drug use” at, say, Coastal Grand Mall or Broadway at the Beach, but not along Ocean Boulevard?

Interestingly, alcohol products, beer, wine and spirits, are not on the proposed list of banned products for the overlay district, although it could be argued that the effects of those products have done much more to ruin families than hookah pipes and sexually suggestive t-shirts.

Of course the mayor and some of the most vocal supporters of this “family friendly” overlay ordinance own beer distributorships and/or bars and restaurants that sell things such as ‘liquid nitrogen cocktails.’

Considering what is on the list of banned products and what is left off, it is highly suggestive this proposed ordinance is not about creating a “family friendly” atmosphere at all. It appears to be targeted at a select group of businesses, owned by Jewish merchants, who are already experiencing a decline in retail sales.

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Smokescreen on Myrtle Beach Family Friendly Zone

Myrtle Beach city council and staff are apparently engaging in an elaborate smokescreen to mask the real reason behind the proposed family friendly zoning for Ocean Boulevard.

When council passed first reading of the ordinance establishing a family friendly zone on the boulevard between 16th Avenue North and 6th Avenue South the reason given was to make the boulevard safer.

It seems, according to the party line, that selling t-shirts and other novelty items with ‘suggestive’ phrases on them and the sale of hookahs and knives caused the spate of shootings which have become all too common on Ocean Boulevard.

It doesn’t seem to make any difference that all these items are sold legally and, in fact, have been sold for many years in many other areas of Myrtle Beach including other sections of the boulevard and in Coastal Grand Mall. For some reason, they only have this strange effect between 16th Avenue North and 6th Avenue South.

If you believe that one, I know of a bridge in Brooklyn for sale.

This action appears to fit into a bigger plan that has been talked about for decades. I submit this is the second step in a larger plan that began when the city used a ‘secret agent’ to buy up land in the superblock and now plans to use eminent domain to obtain the last several parcels that it couldn’t get secretly.

It is interesting to note that despite much talk about a new location for the Children’s Museum and Chapin Memorial Library, no money exists in the city budget to build such a structure.

It appears that this attempt to harass business owners in the proposed family friendly zone may well be nothing more than an attempt to create more empty buildings that can be bought, either secretly or overtly, at reduced prices by the city.

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