(LifeSiteNews) — Nova Scotia’s Education Minister Brendan Maguire launched into an angry tirade condemning parental rights in the provincial legislature this week, responding to an MLA who brought up concerns published by Juno News and the Citizens’ Alliance of Nova Scotia about provincial funding for sex change surgeries for minors and school policies on “social transitioning” without parental notification.

Last July, Juno News published exclusive documents revealing that Nova Scotia doctors had “greenlit five surgeries to create artificial vaginas for patients listed as under 19 years old.”

“I’ll be damned if I’m going to stand here and listen to someone say that the parents deserve rights over a child,” Maguire said angrily. “No, they don’t. They absolutely don’t.”

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Maguire described his own troubled youth as the reason for his passion. “My parents were a sperm donor and an egg donor – that’s it,” he said. “They gave me some genes and they walked away.” He stated that his parents abandoned him at the age of four, and that he suffered from abuse in the foster care system, eventually living on the streets for a time.

Maguire has spoken extensively about his traumatic childhood in the past, including in a Ted Talk.

As for the reporting on “bottom surgeries” done by Melanie Bennett of Juno News, he stated: “If you’re going to quote someone … rather Gandhi than Hitler. Not saying that these people are either. Just know who you’re quoting.” Juno News is an independent Canadian news outlet that has broken many significant stories, and Maguire’s drive-by smear is odd, to say the least.

Maguire also claimed that the cited reporting was “disgusting” and “gross,” and implied that it constituted both “fearmongering” and “hate speech” toward the LGBT community. It is unclear how reporting that details something that is actually happening can be “disgusting” or “hate speech,” but one can infer what Maguire meant.

Maguire’s anger undoubtedly comes from a place of pain, but his comments are particularly concerning for several reasons. Based on his statements, his attack on parental rights appears to be based on the presupposition that parents who oppose LGBT ideology – especially in the case of “social transition” or sex change “treatments” for children – fall into the camp of “abusive.”

Nobody disagrees that genuinely abusive parents forfeit their parental rights. But Maguire appears to be conflating “abuse” with opposition to LGBT ideology – and that is extremely dangerous.

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When he tied “abuse” to LGBT policies, he implied that opposing LGBT policies is, at the very least, an indication of a potentially abusive parent. Perhaps he did not mean this – I would be happy to hear that he did not – but the context of his remarks seem to make it pretty clear that he did, especially because he defended transgender policies.

Maguire is not just a politician – he is a committed LGBT activist. He has defended Nova Scotia’s “Guidelines for Supporting Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Students,” emphasized the “absolute right” of students to name-changes and “preferred pronouns” as well as access to the bathrooms and changerooms of their choice, regularly participates in “Pride” events, and personally intervened last year when South Shore Centre for Education passed a policy restricting all non-official flags (thereby exempting LGBT flags).

It is no surprise that Maguire says parents “absolutely” have no rights over their children. But it is very, very concerning. Parents in Nova Scotia should take note.