The prophet and president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and all the rest of the church's elders are nominally nonpartisan. Every election year, they remind us of it with a tortured statement claiming they don't play favorites between the Democrats and the Republicans.

Don't buy it.

The decision to invite Vice President Dick Cheney to speak at Brigham Young University's April commencement shreds the LDS Church's perennial claims of political neutrality.

At any other school, Cheney's visit would be a coup. Whatever you think about his string-pulling in the Bush presidency, his secrecy in the White House and his single-minded campaign to crush Iraq, the guy is a newsmaker - something I can't say about the University of Utah's commencement speaker choice of LDS Apostle Thomas S. Monson.

But for church-owned BYU, the speech will be problematic. The university's Board of Trustees - which includes the First Presidency - asked for President Bush last year; the White House declined. But this year, they offered up the veep. And Hinckley and the rest of the First Presidency quickly sent off an invitation letter.

Cheney's motivations are clear. A speech at BYU can only be an ego boost for the vice president and his boss - as all visits to redder-than-red Utah are.

I also understand the other trustees' motives: They wanted to recruit an interesting speaker.

But the First Presidency's thinking is a mystery - unless this is finally the ribbon-cutting for a new GOP headquarters on South Temple.

To their credit, many BYU alumni and graduates are protesting the board's pick, signing a petition urging school administrators to withdraw the overture - or at least invite a prominent Democrat to speak on campus at another time.

Cheryl Nunn believes her alma mater is being used to restore Cheney's credibility. "Clearly, Mr. Cheney needs BYU more than BYU needs him right now," Nunn wrote in an e-mail.

No doubt many BYU graduates will willingly wait hours and endure the indignities of security probing while - worst of all - listening to Cheney's pre-speech soundtrack of patriotic country music favorites. Then America's No. 2 will mumble and snarl his justifications for Bush's troop surge in front of cheering throngs of Young Republicans.

As a political reporter, I suspended my disbelief each time Mormon bishops read the neutrality statement from the pulpit. Ten years ago, Elder Marlin Jensen "outed" himself as a Democrat (gasp) in a Tribune article and gave other Mormons permission to do the same. Democratic candidates begged me to repeat the church's statements in my articles. They whispered about meetings at 15 E. South Temple, where church leaders would wring their hands about the imbalance in Utah's politics.

I wanted to believe it because I hoped eventually to cover political stories where the opposition had a chance, where lawmakers worried about the little people rather than tax cuts and moral authority, where Mr. Smith had even odds.

Apparently, church leaders were just going through the motions.

There are other examples of the LDS Church's partisanship. In December, the board of the church-owned Deseret Morning News appointed the former chairman of the State Republican Party, Joe Cannon, to head the newspaper. And the Boston Globe staked out church headquarters last fall to witness meetings between Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's son, Kem Gardner and General Authority Jeffrey Holland.

For all of their carefully cultivated public relations campaigns and protestations to the contrary, the First Presidency's role in Cheney's visit finally lays to rest any question about which side of the political aisle they sit on.

walsh@sltrib.com