Possible to get month names as values when using date:select

I’m working on a project where a user will be entering a date from a
form, and that date will be compared to a date that’s being pulled from
an RSS feed. The RSS feed date format is

03 Jun 2007

so I was hoping to get my form date to use the same format. When I use

<%= f.date_select :thedate, :use_short_month => true %>

on my form, the presentation to the user on the form shows Jun but the
value is 6.

Is there some way to get the form to show the values as the abbreviated
month name as well? Or is there another way someone could suggest that I
easily compare the 03 Jun 2007 format date to the 2007-06-03 format date
that’s being stored in my database? (Beyond writing my own function
mapping them, it seems to me there must be something that would help do
this.)

Thanks,

Sharon