It’s a wonderful children’s story about the perils of appeasement: If You Give a Moose a Muffin,* he’ll want some jam to go with it. You bring him the jam, and then he wants more muffins, and pretty soon, he’s demanding that you hand over your socks to make sock puppets, and before you know it, he’s taken over your whole house and made a huge mess of it.

While it’s fine to mollify a friendly moose this way (if you have plenty of time, muffins, and a housekeeper) when it comes to bullies, you’re better off standing your ground, and maybe rapping them firmly across the nose.

A case in point: At Stanford University, diversity bullies recently stomped all over a job applicant’s resume because his thinking was a little too — well, diverse.

The applicant was Ron Brown, assistant football coach at the University of Nebraska. Brown had applied for the position of head Cardinal football coach. He helped take Nebraska to the Rose Bowl this year, so he may have thought his chances of being hired were pretty good. He assumed Stanford would want to hire the best candidate available.

What a fool. The sign posted on the side of the football stadium should have alerted him. It read, “Christians need not apply.”

Okay, there’s really no such sign, but there might as well be. Brown, an evangelical Christian, was told his religious views were out of sync with Stanford’s liberal student body.

As Alan Glenn, Stanford’s assistant athletic director of human resources explained to the University of Nebraska student newspaper, the Daily Nebraskan, Brown’s religion “was definitely something that had to be considered. We’re a very diverse community with a diverse alumni. Anything that would stand out that much is something that has to be looked at.”

Brown — who hadn’t asked why he wasn’t invited back — was astounded when Stanford unblushingly told him the reason. “If I’d been discriminated against for being black, they would’ve never told me that,” he said. “They had no problem telling me it was because of my Christian beliefs. That’s amazing to me.”

Specifically, it was Brown’s belief in millennia-old teachings about sexuality that led Stanford to punt Brown’s resume straight into the wastebasket. As an evangelical Christian, Brown embraces the biblical teaching that sex should be reserved for monogamously married couples consisting of one man and one woman. Sex between anyone else — unmarried men and women, two men or two women, an adult and a child, or a man and his Cuisinart — is a serious sin.

At Nebraska, Brown was not one to hide his faith under a cornhusker. He went public with his beliefs on his radio program, calling homosexuality a sin. But he emphasized that it was wrong to mistreat homosexuals. “My source of truth is the Bible,” Brown declared. “That does not get me off the hook from loving people.”

Brown is hardly alone in holding these convictions. Orthodox Jews and faithful Muslims also believe that sodomy is sinful, which means Brown’s beliefs are shared by — oh, some three-and-a-half billion people.

By contrast, homosexual activists reject the existence of transcendent truth; moral teachings that assert homosexuality is not morally equivalent to heterosexuality is, to them, merely an opinion — and a wrong one at that. Their solution is to support a campus-wide moral neutrality — one that allows no one’s truth claims to trump anyone else’s.

The problem is, the assertion that homosexual behavior is normative is itself a moral claim. Given this fact, a truly neutral policy would be to insist that no one be allowed to express views about sexual morality. But at Stanford, and many other elite schools, the moral claims of homosexuals are considered “neutral.” This means that those who believe in the morality of anal sex are free to express their views while those who disagree with them are told to shut up.

This is what passes for tolerance at Stanford: In the interests of “diversity” you’re merrily encouraged to think anything you like — as long as you think exactly like members of Stanford’s Queer-Straight Social and Political Alliance.

The Ron Brown imbroglio also shows, yet again, how homosexual activists and their supporters fanatically follow the postmodern predilection for punishing anyone who contradicts them — or at least, pushing them out of academia.

As Christina Hoff Sommers, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, writes in the Christian Science Monitor, “Conservative scholars have effectively been marginalized, silenced, and rendered invisible on most campuses.” As evidence, she points to an experiment by Villanova University psychology professor Richard Redding in which graduate departments were sent fake resumes from twin “candidates” who were nearly identical in all respects except one: One candidate volunteered that he was a conservative Christian. “The professors judged the nonconservative to be the significantly better candidate,” Sommers dryly notes.

You have to wonder if this zeal to weed out “undesirables” affects student applicants, as well. Consider: Large majorities of Americans — some three-quarters of them — say they want homosexuals protected from employment and housing discrimination, along with violence. They want homosexuals to enjoy things like inheritance rights and social security benefits. But — pay attention here — they support these things despite the fact that most (about 85 percent) believe that homosexual behavior is immoral, just as Coach Brown does.

Do Stanford students fit this profile? If not, why not? If the Christians among them (or Muslims or Orthodox Jews) speak out about their beliefs, are they going to be told to take a hike, too? Perhaps they’ll simply be asked to sew little yellow crosses on their coats, so everyone will know who they are.

OK, that’s an exaggeration. But religious discrimination is ugly, whether it takes the form of restrictive clubs, neighborhood covenants, or academic quotas that say, “We’ll allow in just so many of ‘those’ kind of people, and no more.” Someone needs to remind Stanford that Coach Brown’s religious rights don’t end where their well-manicured campus begins — even when it comes to those backward Christians. If the reminder doesn’t come in the form of an expensive lawsuit, I hope it’s at least a serious public shaming.

The latter, in fact, they’ve lately received: The Daily Nebraskan’s outing of Coach Brown’s brush-off turned Stanford into Spin City, with school officials frantically claiming that Brown’s beliefs had nothing — nothing! — to do with their decision, and even if they did, their comments were taken out of context.

Even better, I hope a few radical, free-thinking Stanfordites (if there are any) will help their fellow students see how desperately narrow-minded their school has become. Perhaps what happened to Brown will open their eyes to the true goal of radical homosexuals. It isn’t tolerance. It’s lockstep conformity.

Radical homosexuals want to force fellow citizens — all of us — to affirm that homosexual behavior is good, and quite the equal, morally speaking, of heterosexual relations. Those who dare to suggest otherwise will be exposed, ridiculed, ostracized and — if possible — punished.

This is where the story of the moose and the muffins come in. Yes, Christians should identify and get over any hatred they may secretly harbor towards homosexuals — people for whom Christ also suffered and died. Yes, Christians should oppose violence towards homosexuals, and beyond simply abstaining from violence, to treating them with respect and even friendship. We can and should go along with these requests, absolutely.

But here’s where we must draw the line. We must not buy into the homosexual demand that we sacrifice our principles to their politics. We must not abandon sacred doctrine in favor of secular dogma. When their demands become threats, when careers and degrees and respect are at stake, Christians must remain faithful to the One they serve — to the One who says to follow Him no matter what the cost.

Coach Brown has given us the example: “If I want to interview for a head coaching job, should I erase [my religious beliefs] off my resume? Each day, there’s the temptation,” he told the Daily Nebraskan online. “But no, this world’s not worthy. This thing about following Jesus Christ isn’t flag football. It’s for real. You can’t straddle the line.”

* If You Give A Moose A Muffin, by Laura Joffe Numeroff, Harper Collins, 1991.