"The "silent majority," Viguerie determined, was as motivated by a constellation of family issues, exemplified by gay rights and abortion, as the old conservative standard, anticommunism. The transition was a relatively smooth one. The old right had couched its anticommunism in the rhetoric of family values long before it was fashionable. Even though communism both in the United States and abroad was notoriously homophobic, the old right viewed it as weakening the Christian fabric of the nation, which would enable homosexuals to gain a stronger foothold. Homosexuals were often lampooned as limp-wristed "pinkos," and perhaps the staunchest anticommunist of all, J. Edgar Hoover, took to attacking both homosexuals and communists in identical terms. Faced with the reality that communism was a dying ideology even before the decline of the Soviet Union, the new right and the religious right came to depict homosexuals as one of the chief evils of the modern world. It was the homosexual movement, particularly by gaining admission to the U.S. armed services, that would destroy America from within and make it vulnerable to foreign armies. Furthermore, by infiltrating the schools, homosexuals, like communists, had an insidious influence on the nation's most vulnerable commodity, its children. The new emphasis would leave the new right well stocked with new enemies closer to home after the fall of the "Evil Empire" in the mid-1980s."