Irony of ironies. In their book promoting homosexual practice in the church (The Widening of God's Mercy [Yale U Press]), NT prof Richard Hays (Duke) and his son OT prof Christopher Hays (Fuller) each apply the phrase "hardness of heart" against believers who stand firm against homosexual practice (pp. 16 [C], 130 [R]). They seem not to realize that Jesus applied the expression "hardness of heart" in the opposite way.

Jesus applied the phrase to persons who resist the moral  logic of God's intentional creation of a sexual binary, two sexes, as the foundation of sexual ethics in Genesis 1:27 and 2:24. For Jesus, God's deliberate design of two (and only two) sexual counterparts, "male and female" or "man" and "woman," leads inescapably to the conclusion that God "from the beginning of creation" intended sex to be between two and only two persons, one half of the sexual spectrum (male) with the other half (female) (Mark 10:2-12; Matt 19:3-9). Concurrent polygamy and serial polygamy (remarriage after divorce, at least for any cause) were thus evidence of human "hardness of heart." 

Did the Hayses have no eyes to see, and no ears to hear, that the phrase "hardness of heart" doesn't support their pro-queer position but rather rejects it as heretical, per Jesus? Apparently. This is especially ironic in view of the fact that one of Richard's areas of expertise was picking up echoes between one biblical text and another. Yet he couldn't see the echo of his own words to Jesus' opposite use of the same words.* 

That is ideological blindness and deafness of a whole new order of magnitude. That is what happens when your concern is with your own misguided self-interpreted experience rather than with the word of God, including the words of Jesus.

[*Note: Richard sees only the use of the phrase "hardness of heart" by Jesus in Mark 3:5, applied to those who judged Jesus for healing on the Sabbath. Jesus did not view this application as being in tension with his application of the phrase to rebut those who defy the moral logic of a God-ordained sexual binary. Nor should we.]