The Rise of Identity-Based Jurisprudence (?)

Today's Washington Post has an article on the coming Catholic Supreme Court, containing a complaint from the Feminist Majority Foundation that non-Catholics and non-believers are now underrepresented on the Court.  This is, of course, a dangerously silly perspective on the Court, but doesn't this complaint make a certain degree of sense given the current public discourse?  After all, President Bush himself advertised the relevance of Harriet Miers' religion to her nomination, and Tom DeLay's successful recusal motion in his criminal case simply takes the President's Miers defense to the next outlandish step.  In the Post article, Gerry Bradley may further this trend with his comment about the Catholic justices' "moral traditionalism, a position which is surely in line with their Catholic faith and which they hold, I should think, at least partly due to their faith."  And USC poli sci prof Howard Gillman also comments that many conservative Catholics went into the legal profession "because they felt the constitutional jurisprudence of the country was not reflecting their values," and that he thinks we're "seeing the fruits of those efforts now."

Am I overstating this trend of legal instrumentalism effectuated through judicial identity?  (Dennis Hutchinson, for example, is quoted in the article for the notion that judicial ideology trumps church doctrine.)  If the trend is real, does it simply represent the overdue articulation of the fact that judicial identity has driven jurisprudence all along, or have the culture wars brought us to a new, starker stage of identity-based jurisprudence?

Rob