It took me a few hours, but I finally figured out how and where the HTML parsing is happening and was able to prevent it from being done.
For anyone else looking for this, it is being done in this file:
/wp-content/themes/nirvana/admin/sanitize.php
In the function:
function nirvana_settings_validate($input)
look for the switch statement and locate:
case (preg_match("/.*(copyright|excerpt|customcss|customjs|slidertext|columntext|fronttext).*/i",trim($name)) ? $name: !$name): // long content fields
I added another case just for the fronttext fields to prevent them from being run through the wp_kses_post function:
case (preg_match("/.*(fronttext).*/i",trim($name)) ? $name: !$name): // Leave front-text fields as is -- Matt 2-4-2015