PHP DOMDocument Makes Sibling The Parent

I have been playing around the the DOMDocument API. I am trying to remove or display certain elements based off of user roles. Sometimes I have to remove the a root most level element. Which seems to work . However I do not want the html or body elements to get appended and so I pass in the option LIBXML_HTML_NOIMPLIED to the DOMDocument and then everything seems to get funky.

Before I start manipulating the HTML my html code looks like this:

<span>This should show up for everyone first</span><p roles="ADMIN">Just Chilling</p><p>This Should show up for anyone</p>

My expected output is:

<span>This should show up for everyone first</span><p>This Should show up for anyone</p>

The output I get is:

<span>This should show up for everyone first<p>This Should show up for anyone</p></span>

Notice the span somehow becomes the parent of everything else. Which is not desired. This does not happen if the html and body get appended.

Below is my php code. I have tried both loadHTML and loadXML along with saveHTML and saveXML. Both have their poison. I am pretty flexible about which one i use. My goal is to store html code in the database and then display that on the client. I have no need to store the html body or head tags. Any help would be great.

 public function filterElementsByAccess($user){
        $document = new DOMDocument('1.0', 'UTF-8');
        $attribute = 'roles';
        $document->loadHTML($this->getContent(), LIBXML_HTML_NODEFDTD | LIBXML_HTML_NOIMPLIED);
        $xpath = new DOMXPath($document);
        $roleElements = $xpath->query('//*[@'.$attribute.']');
        if(!empty($roleElements)){
            foreach($roleElements as $roleElement){
                $parentNode = $roleElement->parentNode;
                $roleString = (string)$roleElement->getAttribute('roles');
                $roles = (array)explode(',', $roleString);
                $matchedUserRoles = array();
                foreach($roles as $role){
                    if(!empty($user)){
                        foreach($user->getUserRoles() as $userRole){
                            if(trim(strtolower($userRole->getRole()->getname())) == trim(strtolower($role))){
                                array_push($matchedUserRoles, $role);
                            }
                        }
                    }
                }
                if(count($matchedUserRoles) == count($roles)){
                   $roleElement->removeAttribute($attribute);
                }else{
                    $parentNode->removeChild($roleElement);
                }
            }
        }
        /*
        * This prevents <?xml version=\"1.0\"?> from being outputted since we are using loadXML and not loadHTML cause of custom tags
        */
        $this->setContent(($document->documentElement != null) ? $document->saveXML($document->documentElement) : null);
    }