title: Rails Time.zone parsing doesn't work as expected
body: <p>I ran into this issue while testing a rails app deployed to two different staging servers, in different time zones (PDT and CDT). Both servers have rails using the default UTC config.time_zone. Apart from the timezone configuration being different, both servers have their clocks set correctly.</p>
  
  <p>Below is what I see in a rails console:</p>
  
  <p>On the server where system timezone is CDT,</p>
  
  <pre><code>Time.zone.parse("Mon May 28 2012 00:00:00 GMT-0700 (PDT)")
   =&gt; Mon, 28 May 2012 05:00:00 UTC +00:00 
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>On the server where system timezone is PDT,</p>
  
  <pre><code>Time.zone.parse("Mon May 28 2012 00:00:00 GMT-0700 (PDT)")
   =&gt; Mon, 28 May 2012 07:00:00 UTC +00:00
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The string <code>Mon May 28 2012 00:00:00 GMT-0700 (PDT)</code> is an arbitrary date-time value sent by a client. This is a common scenario when using a javascript Date object coming in via the rails params collection.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Why are the two results <code>Time.zone.parse(identical_date_time_string)</code> different?</strong></p>
  
  <p>If I run the following on both systems, the result appears correct:</p>
  
  <pre><code>"Mon May 28 2012 00:00:00 GMT-0700 (PDT)".to_time
   =&gt; 2012-05-28 07:00:00 UTC
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I'm running rails 3.2.3 with ruby 1.9.3-p125, on ubuntu.</p>