Cheyenne Mayor: ‘I Won’t Back Down’ From Governor Gordon
Cheyenne Mayor Marian Orr said in a Tuesday morning interview with Glenn Woods on the Townsquare Media Wyoming radio stations that she ''won't back down" from a dispute with Governor Mark Gordon over a confrontational meeting the pair had on Friday.
In her interview with Woods, the mayor said the dispute grew out of a conversation with the governor about a potential visit to Cheyenne by the President Of Taiwan during Cheyenne Frontier Days later this year. The mayor says the Taiwanese president, as the first female president of that country, felt a kinship with Mayor Orr, who is the first female mayor of Cheyenne.
Orr said the governor raised issues about whether hosting the Taiwanese president might offend China. Mainland China is ruled by the Communist party, which won a civil war in the late 1940s with the Chinese Nationalist Party, which then retreated to the Island of Formosa and established their own rival Chinese government. While the communist government is generally recognized by most countries around the world as the legitimate government of China, the two countries remain bitter rivals. Mainland China considers Taiwan, not as a separate nation, but as a rogue province that rightfully is part of communist China.
The mayor says that while the governor said he was concerned about offending China, she thinks that he really felt upstaged by the fact that the Taiwanese president was focused on her rather than on the governor. She says the conversation grew heated, with the governor at one point shouting "F*** you mayor!' Orr says she felt physically threatened by the governor and considered walking out of the meeting, but decided against it.
Governor Gordon, for his part, has said he is "deeply offended" by what he calls a "mischaracterization" of the incident. The governor does admit to using the F word, for which he says he does apologize but says the rest of the incident has been misrepresented by the mayor.
Orr issued a news release on the incident on Monday and has also commented on Facebook about the confrontation.
You can hear the entire interview in the audio attached to this article.
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