Stephen Vincent Kobasa is a Connecticut teacher, journalist, and Christian political activist. He focuses his work “in Colombia solidarity, towards abolition of the death penalty and in opposition to nuclear weapons.”[1] He was “instrumental in reconstituting the state’s death penalty abolition movement”[2] in 2000.
The son of a well-known Seymour, Connecticut teacher,[3] Kobasa graduated from Seymour High School in 1965, after which he attended Fairfield University.[4] He holds masters’ degrees from Yale Divinity School and the University of Chicago.[5] Kobasa taught English at St. Thomas Aquinas High School in New Britain, Connecticut, during the 1980s and 1990s. In 1999 he began teaching English at Kolbe Cathedral High School in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He gained national attention when, in October 2005, he was fired from Kolbe for refusing to display the American flag, the presentation of which he viewed as a “contradiction” to the symbol of the Christian crucifix.[6] When his dismissal was reported in the Boston Globe and other major newspapers, his cause was taken up by a number of political and religious publications. To theologian William T. Cavanaugh, Kobasa's action was a protest against “idolatry.” Cavanaugh went on to write that
One final irony of Stephen Kobasa’s firing is that it took place at a Catholic school named after St. Maximilian Kolbe. Kolbe was a Franciscan priest who gave himself up to be starved to death at Auschwitz in place of a man who begged to be spared for the sake of his children. Saints like Kolbe keep us alert to the imperative to put loyalty to God over loyalty to the state.[7]
Kobasa appealed unsuccessfully to Church authorities, including William E. Lori, the Bishop of the Bridgeport Diocese, but has ruled out filing a civil lawsuit. On February 14, 2006, he testified before the Connecticut State Senate’s Labor and Public Employees Committee in favor of a law which would require employers to notify their employees that they are not eligible for unemployment benefits.[8] The bill was signed into law on April 21 by Governor Jodi Rell.
Since 2006 he has been a columnist for the New Haven Advocate. In that capacity he was awarded first prize in Arts and Entertainment writing in a regional, non-daily newspaper by the Society of Professional Journalists.[9] In March 2009, he began a series of “object lessons”—brief reflections on art around New Haven—for the New Haven Independent. Twenty-two have been published as of September 2009.
Kobasa, whose “seemingly average existence has been punctuated by a dozen arrests and short stints in jail,”,[10] has participated in a range of nonviolent antiwar and human-rights protests since the late 1960s.[11] These demonstrations—and Kobasa's philosophy—are consistent with postmodern Catholic peace traditions, especially liberation theology and peaceful resistance; he became a conscientious objector in 1967.[12] In his hometown of New Haven, Connecticut, he is regarded a “regular at anti-war actions around town,”[13] appearing regularly at rallies there. Among his recent activities, Kobasa was the “main facilitator” of an Iraq war memorial established in late 2007 in New Haven's Broadway Triangle,[14] and was a speaker at a 2009 demonstration protesting racial profiling in East Haven, Connecticut organized by Unidad Latina En Acción.[15],[16]