LAS VEGAS — He was a hockey player. It was only a year ago, when she was 16, but Angela Van Berkel talks about the loss of her innocence to a bad boyfriend like some faraway thing. Then the abstinence movement came to her school, with the right words, the perceived mythologies of latex protection, the slide shows of warts and lesions, the logic of celibacy, and the emotional assurance that yes, she could be a virgin again, if she wanted to.

“Some people can say on their wedding night that they waited. That’s something I’ll never get to say. But my theory is to have no regrets, just lessons. I want people to learn from what happened to me. It’s like, sex, I’ve done that, and it sucked,” Van Berkel says, minutes after a shuttle bus has delivered her and about 75 abstinence activists unto the rosy, blinking, blaring boulevard of modern vice — the Vegas Strip, where a sidewalk stroll often brings visitors an array of free semi-porn, stripper ads and call-girl brochures (“UNLV Student, Help Me Pay My Tuition!”; “April — I’ll Relax and Take My Time With You” …).

“It’s Las Vegas, people are here, for, like, only one thing,” says Van Berkel, who came from Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, to Sin City, which, having sapped its marketing potential as a family destination, has returned to selling vice and the erotic arts. (With a new bada-bing style tourism motto: “What Happens Here, Stays Here.”)

Van Berkel is among about 700 people who attended a recent convention here for the Abstinence Clearinghouse, an umbrella organization that mobilizes leaders of the pro-abstinence movement. She also wanted to take to the streets, to tell people it’s never too late to say no to premarital sex.

Van Berkel has a stack of wallet-size “good girl cards” ready to hand out to Vegas’ great hordes of pedestrians. The front of the cards features pictures of fully clothed, fully abstinent young women; the back, in two sentences, debunks condoms as protection against “most sexually transmitted diseases” and claims that married people “live longer, are healthier, have more money and even better sex lives than their single counterparts.” (There were no “good boy cards,” says a Clearinghouse spokesperson, because the Vegas marketplace doesn’t advertise nearly as much male flesh.)

“Remember, we’re all going to smile! We’re happy,” yells Leslee Unruh, president of the Abstinence Clearinghouse, to her assembled. Unruh is a sharply funny Sioux Falls, S.D., wife, mother and grandmother who ran pregnancy clinics and protested abortion and then found herself as something of a lieutenant commander in the current culture war. “Smile! We’re not here to judge!”

These are heady times for the wait-till-marriage crowd. They’re being invited into schools and getting teens to sign virginity pledge cards, exploring that virgin territory between preaching and teaching. They speak of a new cultural revolution, an antidote to the ’70s.

Emboldened by a friend in the White House and a record amount of federal funding to abstinence-only educational programs — $135 million this year, nearly half of it available in Health and Human Services grants to a melange of faith-based and secular counseling programs that adhere to a strict, eight-point abstinence doctrine, the other half tied to Title V welfare reform — the virgin advocates are now going for bigger money. Unruh’s Abstinence Clearinghouse is networking in Africa, with a third of President Bush’s $15 billion Global AIDS Bill earmarked for the abstinence message.

“It’s rebellious, what’s going on here, absolutely,” says Keith Deltano, 39, a traveling abstinence comedian and motivational speaker from North Carolina, who sells his shtick to churches and school districts. (Like most people in the abstinence biz, Deltano can excise religious content from his routine when federal or state dollars are paying the bill.)

Deltano served in the Army, then taught middle school. When a sixth-grader showed up in his class pregnant, he says, he sort of flipped. “I couldn’t get them to bring a pencil to social studies. How’s a condom going to help themfi”

Now he’s here, a refugee from what he sees as a dangerous world of easy sex and the hopeless lies of “comprehensive” sex education that hands out condoms and — it’s never a very far leap for the abstinence believers to extend this point — contributes to a social ruin of Internet pornography, casual sex, Christina Aguilera, teen moms on welfare.

“Overweight, 45-year-old housewives,” Deltano observes, looking around at his fellow cultural vanguards. “Never underestimate them. These people are tough, they’re tenacious, and they’re changing the world.”

Abstinence has found its own sense of vogue. The Marriott convention center is decked out with slick, pro-virgin advertising and a hip-hop beat. Big-screen TVs play pro-abstinence commercials on a continuous loop. Logos everywhere: Virginity Rules. Passion & Principles. Abstinence in Motion. Project Reality. Worth the Wait. Truth 4 Youth.

“We love sex!” screams Unruh. She is on the podium, greeting the conventioneers for a luncheon.

“We love sex, don’t wefi!” she says to her army. “And the best sex is in marriage! Abstinence comes to Sin City! Abstinence meets Temptation Island!”

Unruh says Vegas makes people think of sex, so that’s where she needed to be. She wants as much media along as she can get. She fights Hollywood with Hollywood. “I got to do all the shock jock shows,” she brags, “which is exactly where we want to take this message. Look, you’ve got that Strip which is two miles long of sex, sex, sex. You’ve got buses coming and going to the ranches, the brothels. But you’ve also got the sixth-largest public school district in the country. You have parents who need a lot of help.”

So that’s why Abstinence Elvis comes rushing up to the stage shouting about waiting until marriage. Unruh starts dancing with him to an exceedingly mediocre rendition of “Viva Las Vegas.”

Unruh met this Elvis, aka James Rompel, last year, when she saw him perform at dinner. She just had a hunch he would be pro-abstinence. She asked, after the show.

Elvis said he’d be happy to be the Abstinence King. Unruh converts wherever she goes, believing even in the revirginization of the icon who symbolically deflowered America in the late 1950s. “See how these things just workfi” she asks.

This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page C2.