Selenium2Library - Safari not selecting from drop down list - safari

Question

I have two drop downs on a page. I need to verify that the item in drop down list 1 has a class of "selected" added to it when the item in drop down list 2 has been selected. Drop down list 1 has more than 3 options in it but I wanted to save space in the post. The first chunk of steps gets the values for all the items in the list and randomly selects one.
The second portion uses the value that was randomly selected in the first few steps to target the option and see check for the selected class to be true.
Here is the HTML:
<ol>
<li class="select input required" id="message_recipient_input">
<select id="message_recipient_id">
<option value></option>
<option value="1">Smith, Bob</option>
<option value="2">Smith, Steve</option>
<option value="3">Smith, Joe</option>
</select>
</li>
</ol>
<ol>
<li class="select input required" id="message_template_input">
<select id="message_template_id">
<option value></option>
<option value="9">Message Template</option>
<option value="10">Survey Template</option>
<option value="11">Coupon Template</option>
</select>
</li>
</ol>
Here are the steps in RF:
${RecipientCount}= Get Matching Xpath Count xpath=//*[#id="message_recipient_id"]/option
Log ${RecipientCount}
#{ValueList}= Create List
: FOR ${INDEX} IN RANGE 1 ${RecipientCount}
\ ${recipient_value}= Get Element Attribute xpath=//*[#id="message_recipient_id"]/option[contains(text(), '#')] [${INDEX}]#value
\ Log ${recipient_value}
\ Append To List ${ValueList} ${recipient_value}
Log ${ValueList}
${recipient}= Evaluate random.choice(${ValueList}) random
Log ${recipient}
Sleep 2s
Select From List id=message_recipient_id ${recipient}
Sleep 2s
${message_template_dropdown}= Select From List By Value id=message_template_id 9
Sleep 2s
${selected_recipient}= Get Element Attribute xpath=//option[#value=${recipient}] #selected
Log ${selected_recipient}
Should Contain ${selected_recipient} true
This works fine in Chrome and Firefox on Mac OS X but Safari isn't selecting any of the items in the lists. The steps pass as if it is selecting them but fails on the "Should Contain" step because ${selected_recipient} has None for the selected class.