Well, I can certainly play with changing the z-indexes in the hueman theme within the responsive.css, I'm just afraid if I change one I'll end up accidentally hiding something else without knowing it and thus I was kind of hoping someone with a little bit more knowledge than me could give me an idea of what was ok.
Oddly enough I just got done cranking down every single z-index (even to some negative values) I could find in the slider plugin I'm using (which is Advanced Posts Slider btw), and the slider STILL clips over the sidebar! I used inspect element in Chrome and saw that for some reason, one z-index set to auto would crank up to 50 when the slide transitioned, but I've control+F my way through that plugin for the last 30 minutes or so and can't find it. :(