In projects with ActiveSupport the invalid dates are not handled correctly

ActiveSupport adds the to_date function to a string
http://guides.rubyonrails.org/active_support_core_extensions.html#string-conversions

When an invalid date is entered it would throw an ArgumentError because the string isn't handled in the rescue block.

Just altering the order fixed this issue, strings are now matched before objects that respond to the to_date function.