Editor's Note: This is part five of a five–part series addressing the gay community and its relationship to organized religion. Part five focuses on a local church that welcomes the gay community to worship openly.  LGBTQI stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning and inter-sex.

As Westview Community Church set to offer its second session of the Living Waters program, which offers homosexual individuals counseling to become straight, Manhattan finds itself in a debate over whether such a program should be offered. Aside from conflicting religious views, therapists and others disagree about whether the program works and if providing such a service would only confuse and damage people seeking help.

"I don't think it's appropriate because it makes an assumption that there is something wrong with someone that has to be fixed," said Rev. R. Kent Cormack, pastor and teacher at First Congregational United Church of Christ.

Cormack, who is openly gay and in a same sex-marriage with the church organist, has been a pastor at First Congregational since 2000. He said his church performs same-sex marriages and encourages its congregation to recognize these unions.

Cormack said not all churches share the view First Congregational holds, but he takes great pride in his church's history of welcoming Christians of all sexual orientations, genders and races.

He said his church was specifically formed in Manhattan to support abolitionism, and he likes to think his congregation is on the forefront of people's individual liberty.

Deb Kluttz, the executive pastor at Westview Community Church, said the issue is about more than just the church's role. She said she feels some churches support societal views over biblical precepts. Furthermore, she said even therapists are becoming open to aspects of life that should not be taken so lightly.

Kluttz said she knows there are many therapists who would not see pornography as a sexual addiction.

"They would say ‘You just need to get more comfortable with it; you just need to look at it together,'" Kluttz said. "There are therapists that would promote it. To me that is kind of brainwashing, trying to change their belief about these things, and I just think there is a place inside that this does not feel right."

As a small, conservative city in the Bible Belt, Manhattan might be slower to expand the rights of gay citizens like other cities, but there are people out to change that.

Dusty Garner, senior in political science, has made it a personal mission to be a leader in the local gay community, which lacked unification a few years ago. Being from the town of Douglas, Kan., Garner said he knows all too well the stigmas of being homosexual in the Bible Belt.

"The big turning point for me in high school was when I started owning it instead of denying it to everybody," Garner said. "When people saw that I took pride in myself, then they started respecting me more."

Garner said he has been advocating for gay rights since high school and even had to fight to get his diploma in Kansas. Garner said many in the community felt being a homosexual meant one could not be morally upstanding and started a petition to stop him from graduating. The petition was sent to the school board because in 1994 the school's diploma had the phrase: "received the education necessary to be a morally upstanding citizen of the state of Kansas."

The school board rejected the petition, and Garner graduated with his peers.

Garner credits much of his strength to his family's support through the years — most notably his mom. He said his family is not very religious, but his step-grandmother did take some time to send him a letter once his mother announced Garner was gay.

"She sent me a list of Bible verses she had documented that said I was going to hell," Garner said, laughing. "I'm not much of a shrinking violet so I very promptly took a Polaroid photo of my baptismal Bible, sent it back to her and said, ‘Thanks, but I have my own.'"

Garner said many people in rural towns struggle to come out because they do not have the ability to see other people who identify as LGBTQI living fulfilled lives.

"I suppose part of it is human nature," Cormack said. "We are better at building fences than getting rid of them. There's something about human nature that even though we know it's not supposed to be that way, even though the scripture says it shouldn't be that way, we just like to feel like we're a little better, but that means someone has to be a little worse."

Cormack said people tend to stigmatize groups that are different.

On the opposite side of town, and this debate, Kluttz said she stands by her belief homosexuality is stated in the Bible as wrong and feels society is driving the notion that homosexuality is natural.

"You've got some churches that are embracing the beliefs of society, which are anti-biblical in a number of cases, and the embracing of homosexuality is one of them," Kluttz said.

Westview Community Church is not one of them,

"Then you have churches in town like ours that are saying ‘No, that is not natural, not normal, that is not even God's design for an individual or for a family,' and we would stand in opposition to that normalization," she said.

Kluttz said the distinction is very important to Westview Community Church and was an area it would not bend on.

As a nonreligious leader, Garner said he believes religious texts have good morals, meanings and intentions, but have a long-lasting effect when they are used against somebody to hurt them. He acknowledged there is a large LGBTQI community in churches, but in general the LGBTQI community, especially in the United States, has turned its back on religion because of negative experiences.