If you are going to execute this SELECT inside a Python script, you should not be placing strings straight into your database query - else you run the risk of SQL injections. See the psycopg2 docs - the problem with query parameters.
Instead you need to use placeholders and place all your string arguments into an iterable (usually a tuple) which is passed as the second argument to cursor.execute(). Again see the docs -passing parameters to sql queries.
So you would create a cursor object, and call the execute() method passing the query string as the first argument and a tuple containing the two dates as the second. Eg
query = "SELECT to_char(gltx.post_date, 'YYYYMMDD') FROM gltx WHERE (gltx.post_date > %s AND gltx.post_date < %s)"
args = (start_date, end_date)
cursor.execute(query, args)
To format the date in Python space, you can use the strftime() method on a date object. You should probably be working with datetime objects not strings anyway, if you want to do anything more than print the output.
You also probably want to validate that the date entered into the raw_input() is a valid date too.