I don't remember. The only thing I can I think of, is maybe at one point somewhere inside one of the methods Rails was calling `is_a?(Hash)` or some other class in order to decide what to do with the conversion, so I just wanted to be explicit about this object is not going to say it's anything if asked what it is, to be sure we went down the expected path of code.

However, after reviewing the code a bit, I don't see that, so I'll remove this `is_a?` thing.