Obama Courts Gay Vote in Ohio, Texas, Nationwide

The campaign of Sen. Barack Obama has ramped up efforts this week to reach out to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered voters. On Wednesday, the campaign announced that ads targeting LGBT voters had been purchased in several LGBT magazines in Texas and Ohio. Today, the campaign released an open letter to LGBT voters urging them to support the Illinois senator.

The move is seen as an effort to cut into support for Sen. Hillary Clinton, who has thus far held the majority of the LGBT vote in the race for the Democratic nomination.

"While we have come a long way since the Stonewall Riots in 1969, we still have a lot of work to do," the ads in Texas and Ohio say. "The issue of LGBT rights is exploited by those who seek to divide us. But at its core, this issue is about who we are as Americans. It's about whether this nation will live up to its founding promise of equality by treating all its citizens with dignity and respect."

In an open letter to the community on Thursday, Obama appealed to LGBT voters to support his candidacy. "I’m running for President to build an America that lives up to our founding promise of equality for all -- a promise that extends to our gay brothers and sisters," wrote Obama. "It’s wrong to have millions of Americans living as second-class citizens in this nation. And I ask for your support in this election so that together we can bring about real change for all LGBT Americans."

While Clinton and Obama have very similar positions on a slew of LGBT issues, Obama highlighted his support for a full repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act, signed into law by former President Bill Clinton and about which Sen. Clinton has advocated only a partial repeal.

The increased targeting of the community has led some to wondering: Will Obama be the first gay president the way that Bill Clinton was the first black president? Shaun Jacob Halper of the Huffington Post gives the ups and downs of what an Obama presidency might mean for LGBT Americans, and how Obama is cutting into Hillary Clinton's large base of LGBT supporters.

If Bill Clinton was, as Toni Morrison once argued, our first Black president, could Barack Obama be our first gay? Is Obama the hope lesbians and gays have been waiting for -- and if not, why should all Americans care?

[Lesbian talk show host Ellen Degeneres] is an outspoken [Clinton supporter] and gay boys, of course, have long held a soft spot for a tragic diva -- even a hawk-diva in a pants-suit who has only been married once... But it may be the drama-free Obama -- despite his opposition to same-sex marriage -- who engenders a cultural breakthrough in LGBT history; at the very least, his example offers some hortatory lessons for the gay community.

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Gays are still objects of amusement or fear or hostility, but little else. As one scholar put it over a decade ago, “No one wants to be called a homosexual.” No one, perhaps, but Obama. Obama is rewriting and reframing the cultural discourse on gay and lesbian rights… Obama is creating the cultural conditions within which political, legal, and social change can take place.

The campaign of Sen. John McCain has not done any outreach to LGBT voters. McCain does not support repeal of any part of the Defense of Marriage Act, but opposes a constitutional amendment on the issue of marriage.