Kirk Cameron on anti-LGBT remarks: I've been bullied too

Actor Kirk Cameron said on Tuesday that he can sympathize with the LGBT people who he has called "unnatural" and "destructive" because he has been bullied too.

In an interview with CNN's Piers Morgan earlier this month, Cameron asserted that his Christian faith taught him that homosexuality was "destructive to so many foundations of civilization."

NBC's Ann Curry asked the actor on Tuesday if he was encouraging hate speech.

"I love all people," Cameron insisted. "I hate no one. And when you take a subject and you reduce it to something like a four second sound bite and a check mark on a ballot, I think that's inappropriate and insensitive."

"Do you feel any responsibility for saying words like that, that might encourage people to feel that it's OK to mistreat gay people?" Curry pressed.

"Nobody should mistreat anybody," Cameron replied. "Homosexuals should not be mistreated. Heterosexuals should not be mistreated. Bisexuals should not be mistreated."

He added: "All of us who think really deeply about issues like gay marriage and abortion and homosexuality have convictions on issues. We all have our convictions informed by different things and mine are informed by my faith. They are informed by the Word of God."

"When people start bullying one another and calling each other names for those convictions then I think you get into problems. And I have also been on the receiving end of that."

Cameron in the process of promoting his new documentary, "Monumental," which he says is an attempt to find out how to save America by retracing the steps of The Pilgrims who settled in present-day Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1620.

"What I learned about The Pilgrims and who they were -- I thought they were these religious fuddy-duddies who scurried out of England with their tail between their legs looking for freedom," he told Fox News on Tuesday. "And I find out that these were the free-thinkers of their day. These were the out-of-the box radicals that risked and suffered and sacrificed it all for the sake of their kids."

Watch this video from NBC and Fox News, uploaded March 20, 2012.