Diversity of ... what exactly?

If the Court is trending toward selection based on personal characteristics because President Obama believes who you are is how you think, then it's probably wise not to hide -- or deny -- those personal characteristics.

More importantly, what kind of American "diversity" are we gaining by playing identity politics, instead of choosing the most experienced and wisest judicial minds regardless of the bodies housing them?

James Piereson, Weekly Standard:

Considered as a group, the absence of genuine diversity on the Court is more than a little stunning.

Here, then, is the line-up of the current Court, with nominee Kagan penciled in, with their colleges, law schools, religious background, and region of residence listed:

In terms of undergraduate colleges, five of the nine attended Ivy League institutions (Princeton, Harvard, and Cornell), and two attended Stanford University. The two outliers are Scalia and Thomas who (as Catholics) attended Georgetown University and Holy Cross (respectively). There are no public institutions represented in the bunch, even though the overwhelming majority of college students in the United States attends such institutions. Outstanding public systems such as those in the states of Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, California, Texas, and Florida are completely unrepresented on the Court. It is as if people who live in the vast region between New York and California do not exist for the purposes of the Supreme Court.

With respect to law schools, the unrepresentative character of the Court is even more pronounced. Eight of the nine justices (including Kagan) attended either Harvard or Yale Law Schools; the ninth—Ginsburg—attended Columbia. Just three Ivy League law schools have supplied the legal education of the entire Supreme Court. What kind of diversity is that? There are fine law schools in every state of the union, many of which are highly rated even by Ivy League standards. These schools train the leaders of their respective states, yet the graduates of such schools are nowhere represented on the Supreme Court. In past generations they sent many distinguished graduates to the Supreme Court, typically appointed by presidents who were sensitive to the importance of regional and political diversity on the highest court in the land.

In terms of regional representation, the current Court (again with Kagan included) is composed of eight members from northeastern states and a single member (Kennedy) from California. Three of the nine members—Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagan—were born and raised in New York City, and two (Scalia and Alito) hail from nearby New Jersey. Thomas grew up in Georgia and Roberts in Indiana, but both attended school in the Northeast and embarked on legal careers there as adults. Aside from these childhood attachments, the vast interior of the country is unrepresented on the Court.

Nor is there much religious diversity on the Court as six members are Roman Catholics and three are Jewish. In this sense, they are more or less representative of the region in which they have made their careers.
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It is wonderfully ironic that this is the world that has been given to us by more than thirty years of diversity mongering on college campuses and law schools. The more diverse or egalitarian we claim to be, the less diverse and representative we become in practice. The same trend that we observe on the Supreme Court is evident as well among our recent presidents and presidential candidates, all of whom seem to arise from common educational backgrounds among elite undergraduate institutions or Ivy League law schools. So it is that our obsession with diversity and difference has at length produced a governing class of monolithic sameness whose members are increasingly out of touch with the citizens for whom they propose to legislate.

"Diversity mongering". I like.

And remember, kids: It took 50s conformity to give us the 60s rewrite. The more things change...